Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story.

KING JR., Martin Luther.

Item Number: 126157

New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1958.

First edition, early printing of Dr. Martin Luther King’s first book. Octavo, original half cloth, illustrated. From the Library of Anita Loos with her name to the front free end paper. The gift inscription on the front free endpaper reads, “For darling Anita, with much love, from Little Dorothy February 14, 1960.” Anita Loos was the silent screen’s first female screenwriter and its most prolific with at least 75 scripts between 1912 and 1956. She was also a novelist, playwright and stage producer (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) as well as one of New York’s social elite for decades. The Valentine’s day gifter of this copy “Little Dorothy” was Dorothy Fellowes-Gordon, lifelong mate of Elsa Maxwell, gossip columnist and author, songwriter, screenwriter, radio personality and professional hostess, renowned for her parties for royalty and high society figures of her day. Loos, Felloes-Gordon and Maxwell knew each other intimately and for decades in New York. The Little Dorothy of the inscription may have been a standing joke between them as Fellowes, at 6 feet tall dwarfed over the diminutive 4 foot 11″ Loos. In very good condition.

Stride Toward Freedom is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s account of the first successful large-scale application of nonviolence resistance in America is comprehensive, revelatory, and intimate. King described his book as "the chronicle of fifty thousand Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who, in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth.''