Book People Archive

The Wild Party

I've recently received a request from a reader for an online
edition of _The Wild Party_ by Joseph Moncure March.
It's an interesting example of how an important work can fall
into obscurity, only to be rescued and re-worked in interesting
ways, thanks in part to the public domain.  

Art Spiegelman, who brought the poem back into print, called it
"a hard-boiled, jazz-age tragedy told in syncopated rhyming couplets".
Louis Untermeyer, a well-known poetry editor of the early 20th century,
said of it "I'm not sure that it is poetry at all.
All I am certain of it is that this is one of the most rapidly moving,
vividly projected, highly excited manuscripts I have read in years."
William Burroughs said of it, "It's the book that made me want to
be a writer."

It was published in 1928, immediately became a scandal for
its sexual themes, and was banned in Boston, and elsewhere.
Apparently it became quite hard to find not long afterwards.
The author published a bowdlerized version in 1968, near
the end of his life, but it wasn't the same.

However, because the original book's copyright was apparently never
renewed, the poem in its original form lapsed into the public domain
in the US.  That helped it find new life in the adaptations of others.
A Merchant-Ivory film based on the poem came out in 1975.
But the poem itself really came back into public attention
when Spiegelman, best known for his Holocaust-themed
graphic novel _Maus_, found an old copy of the book in a used bookstore,
and was inspired to create an extensively illustrated edition.  That came out
in 1994, and the combination of text and image in that edition gained
a number of admirers.  Two sets of admirers decided to put musical
adaptations into production, one of which was nominated
for multiple Tony awards in 2000 after it opened on Broadway.
(A story on the musicals, mentioning how one of the musical creators
discovered the poem via Spiegelman and then found out it was public-domain,
can be found at http://www.freep.com/fun/arts/lippa21_20000221.htm )
Now you can find over 400 web pages that mention the poem and
its author, according to Google.

So far, though, no one has put the original poem online, as far
as I can tell.  It's not terribly long (Spiegelman's edition runs
a little over 100 pages, but has lots of pictures), but I'm busy enough that I
really shouldn't do it myself.  Is anyone in the US (the copyright
may still be in force elsewhere) interesting in having a go at it?

John