Pleiades Club Year Book New York: Pleiades Club, 1912 (April) First limited edition, #365, suede binding

Atkinson # B1     Sanborn and Clark # 1

NOTES:  Contains "Free." O'Neill's first appearance in a book. Signed presentation to Robert Sisk laid in.

INSCRIPTION:  [On Casa Genotta stationary]

Dear Bob: This for your Pleiades book with that so buyutiful poem of mine in it -- / Again, with all friendship! / Gene / Dec. 34

The Pleiades Club was composed of actors, artists, and writers who met in Greenwich Village in the interest of "Bohemian good fellowship." G. Warren Landon, a member of the club, arranged to have O'Neill's poem "Free" published in the club's yearbook. O'Neill was introduced to Landon by his brother Jamie, and it is probably more than a coincidence that Landon also wrote the words to the club's drinking song. Limited to 500 copies, the yearbook was distributed mainly among the members of the club.

Robert Sisk was the publicity agent for the Theatre Guild. Sisk and his wife Cepha became close friends with Eugene and Carlotta O'Neill. O'Neill's sarcastic reference to his "buyutiful poem" is consistent with his feelings expressed elsewhere about his poetry. He once wrote a friend who asked to republish some of his verse, "It would be a shame to waste good type on such nonsense. If those small-town jingles of my well-misspent youth were amusingly bad, I would have no objection, for their republication might hand someone a laugh, at least. But they're not. They are merely very dull stuff."