first edition, 12mo, [36] pp advertisements, 189 pp., bound in original publisher's green muslin, printed paper spine label mainly eroded, front and rear free endpapers lacking, minor scattered foxing to text, else a very good copy. Early ownership signatures of T. J. Dorsey Beck and W. L. Shoemaker.

First edition in original binding of William Gilmore Simms's first novel and the work that launched his literary career. An important work of American realism, Simms' biographer called it "one of America's first fictional studies of the psychology of crime."

Martin Faber is a study in criminology and psychopathy. Simms relates the early life of Faber whose later behavior was in part the result of a weak and ineffectual father and the petting and spoiling he received from his mother. Faber became a rude and insolent boy who delighted in defying the local schoolmaster who he later assaulted and turned the blame for the violence upon the teacher forcing his removal from town. As he matured Martin Faber exhibited more of the conventional symptoms of the morally insane. Totally lacking in moral standards, he lived only to assert and elevate his ego. Yet in Simms's interpretation Martin was not happy: "The moral darkness is the most solid - and what cold is there like that, where, walled in a dungeon of hates and fears and sleepless hostility, the heart broods in bitterness and solitude, over its own cankering and malignant purposes."

Martin's real trouble begins when he seduced fifteen year old Emily and then married a prominent heiress. But before the marriage Martin was forced to strangle Emily, who was well advanced in pregnancy, because she had threatened to reveal her secret to the heiress. After wedging the body in a cavity between some rocks, Faber felt loftier and manlier than ever before: "There is something elevating - something attractive to the human brute, in being a destroyer." He delighted in associating the word "murder" with his own name, and received great satisfaction in horrifying his best friend, William Harding by an account of the event. When Harding was finally driven by his conscience to report to the authorities, the body could not be found.

Inasmuch as public opinion was naturally hostile to a man who bore false witness, William Harding was placed in a most embarrassing position. His efforts to find Emily's body and thus to clear his own reputation and conscience constitute a primitive and early American detective story. But Simms was primarily concerned with the total depravity of Martin Faber, who, discovering that his wife and Harding were attracted to each other, expended much effort in stimulating the romance in a perverse attempt to dishonor his bride and friend.

After finally bringing Martin to justice, Harding sympathetically gave the prisoner a dagger to prevent the shame of his dying upon the scaffold. Faber's last act of violence, however, was to stab his wife when she refused to curse Harding as the destroyer of her husband. In the end, lacking courage to commit suicide, Martin Faber died on the gallows.

Martin Faber caused an immediate sensation upon its publication, receiving positive notices from a number of influential reviewers including Edgar Allen Poe. Poe in fact so admired Simms's work that he would later borrow heavily from it in creating the central character of his short story William Wilson, whose similarity to Simms's Faber has been frequently noted.

The work can be said to be one of the originators of the peculiarly American literary genre dealing with the psychotic killer.

Sabin 81236; Wright I:1426; BAL 18044; see Davis, David, Homicide in American Fiction, pp. 137-139