2 James Wright first editions are documented on this shelf, from The Green Wall (1957) to The Branch Will Not Break (1963) across 2 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that James Wright title from later printings and book-club copies — the publisher and year to expect, the number-line or edition-statement conventions, and the tells that show up in online listings.

Identification only, per the house rule: no prices and no appraisals here. Checking a James Wright copy in hand? Type the title into the First-Edition Checker or photograph the copyright page with Snap & Sort.

The Green Wall — 1957 · Yale University Press, New HavenTrue first is the Yale University Press printing of 1957, issued as Volume 53 in the Yale Series of Younger Poets with a foreword by W. H. Auden, collating xix + 93 pp. Yale's documented practice from 1930 to 1985 was to print the publication date on the title page only in the case of a first printing; a reprint instead states the date of first publication on the copyright page and lists the reprintings. A first…. US only, and the census claim is confirmed. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1957 is the sole first edition of Wright's debut; no UK or original-language edition precedes or competes with it. The Yale Series of Younger Poets volume is the only edition collected as the first. No book-club issue is documented. The principal reprint trap is the AMS Press reissue of the complete Yale Series of Younger Poets (ISBN 0404538533), a later library-style reprint of the whole series. Otherwise the tells are a copyright page that lists reprintings, or a jacket whose front flap reads 'Second Printing'.
The Branch Will Not Break — 1963 · Wesleyan University Press, Middletown CTFirst printing is identified by Wesleyan University Press house practice, corroborated by three independent identification guides: the copyright page of a first states either 'First Edition' or 'First Printing', and subsequent printings are noted on the copyright page — so any copy carrying a later-printing note is not a first. Issued simultaneously in cloth and in wrappers, and both are collected as…. US only. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1963. No British first edition of the collection is recorded. First thus traps: the poems are reset in Wright's Collected Poems (Wesleyan, 1971) and in Above the River: The Complete Poems (1990); Wesleyan has also kept the title continuously in print under ISBN 0819510181, so copies bearing that ISBN in commerce are late printings, not firsts. No book-club edition documented. The practical confusion is the simultaneous first-printing wrappers issue versus the many later Wesleyan paperback printings of the same title — these are separated by the printing note Wesleyan adds to the copyright page on subsequent printings, not by binding format.

More Poetry, Beat & Drama shelves: John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Langston Hughes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Lord Byron.

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