Scarecrow

New York: Doubleday, 1974. First edition. Hardcover with copper cloth boards and black lettering in pictorial dust jacket, 8vo, 293 pp. Very good, remainder spray to bottom paper edge, former owner's name on back endpaper, lightly worn cloth edges/Very good jacket, lightly worn and chipped edges, couple small tears, and mild soiling. Jacket design by David November; jacket woodcut by Barbara Bascove. Following contributions to journals and periodicals in the early 1960s, his social criticism was compiled and edited into the landmark Sex and Racism in America in 1965, followed by White Paper for White Americans in 1966 and Coming Together: Black Power, White Hatred, and Sexual Hang-ups in 1971---all published by Doubleday. As a co-founder of Umbra, Hernton was also part of a foundational group of New York City black poets and playwrights. As a poet, he worked closely with Aldo Tambellini, Henry Grimes and Ben Morea in experimental performance art. A work of fiction that took eight years to craft, Scarecrow 'is a novel of many dimensions: sex, drugs, mythology, witchcraft, violence, deformity, tenderness, fear, diabolic possession, reincarnation, schizophrenia, spiritual torment and death...' Part detective novel, part acid trip and part love triangle gone haywire, released in 1974, Scarecrow is Hernton's first and only published novel.