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Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey; London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press. Published 1936 (MCMXXXVI on title page). Hardcover, 160 pp.; 21 cm; first edition; illustrated with eight black-and-white photographic plates including a frontispiece reproducing a University of Cincinnati Applied Arts mural of the young Foster at Irwin & Foster, with daguerreotype, period lithographs, and views of mid-nineteenth-century Cincinnati.
In Very Good condition with a Good dust jacket. Red cloth-covered boards with a printed cream paper spine label ornamented with red Celtic-knot decorative borders, printed in red. Boards in very good condition with very mild surface wear; binding tight. Pencil gift inscription "From Miss Church" on the front free endpaper; small "16919" stamped on the front pastedown; otherwise unmarked, with very mild toning to the pages. Tan paper dust jacket with several chips and tears (each one inch or less) and light creasing to the edges; moderate overall surface wear and soiling. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. Raymond Walters (1885-1970) was president of the University of Cincinnati from 1932 to 1955 and an enthusiastic chronicler of the city's cultural history. This study examines the four years (1846-1850) Stephen Collins Foster spent in Cincinnati as a young bookkeeper for the steamboat commission firm Irwin & Foster (years Foster himself called the happiest of his life) during which he composed "Oh! Susanna" and other songs that would soon be roared by the Forty-Niners on their covered-wagon journeys west. Walters drew on the Foster Hall Collection at Indianapolis, then directed by Fletcher Hodges, Jr., and dedicated the volume to Josiah K. Lilly of Indianapolis. Contents: Prefatory; A Boy Visits Cincinnati; River Commerce; Turmoil and Calm Order; Friends and Acquaintances; The Queen City of the West; In Old Kentucky; Plantation Melodies; A Tale of Two Border Cities; The Stage and the Concert Hall of the Forties; Stephen Wins Success; Poet, Musician and Man; Echoes of the Mexican War; In the Summer of 1848; The Forty-Niners Pass Through; God's Plenty; Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair; "The Weather is Bitter Cold"; Sources and Annotations; Index.