Shute, Henry A. The Real Diary of a Real Boy [SIGNED]

Shute, Henry A. (Augustus). The Real Diary of a Real Boy. Chicago: The Reilley & Lee Co., ca. 1920. [507]

Red cloth with light wear & soil, tight binding, 7 1/2 x 5 1/4 inches, 200 pp., no dj.  Inscribed on the ffep, "The very sincere regards of Henry A. Shute to Stephen A. Condrey, 'Plupy'. Exeter, N. H. Sept. 19. 1928."

With a typewritten letter from Mr. Condrey to John S. Mayfield, post date Aug. 29, 1938, with personal news & his plans to send this book to Mayfield. The envelope is pasted to the rear free endpaper, Mayfield's name sticker is on the rear pastedown. A clipping from the mailing envelope is also folded and laid in.

If you like the humor of Mark Twain and the antics of Our Gang, this book is for you.

The last copyright date in the book is 1906 but the name Reilly & Lee Co. was not used until 1919.

Henry Augustus Shute (1856-1943), a Harvard graduate (1879) who was raised in Exeter, New Hampshire. He started writing stories based upon his childhood in Exeter with the local paper printing his weekly column. He rose to fame with The Real Diary of a Real Boy in 1902. He went on to write a total of 20 books, including Plupy the Real Boy (1911); The Youth Plupy, or the Lad with the Downy Chin (1917); and Plupy, The Wirst Yet, (1929).

The Real Diary of a Real Boy "was so beloved that it went into at least seventeen editions in [the author's] lifetime and at least three more after it (and so beloved that he wrote not one but several sequels to it)...in his own time he was a living legend - as lawyer, judge, musician, and especially, as author....in 1902, came the bombshell, The Real Diary of a Real Boy, the book that made Shute's reputation as a humorist and that is the one book above all by which he is remembered...The real boy himself could not be doubted. He was of course Harry Shute, aged eleven in 1867-1868 and a lively lad with lively contemporaries who got into all manner of trouble in and out of school. Plupy' escapades were legion...Every reader will have favorite passages that delight. The pleasure, it will be noted, is partly visual, for in Real Diary Shute's entries are all in Plupy's godawful phonetic spelling, a carefully crafted perversion of orthography that continues to appeal." - Freiberg, Malcolm. “‘The Real Diary of a Real Boy’, Its Author, and Its Sequels.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 109, 1997, pp. 37–51. JSTOR online.

The former owner, John S. Mayfield, was a rare book collector and curator of the division of manuscripts and rare books at Syracuse University.