OICR Prize for the Redemption of the Most Illustrious Lost, Discarded, or Forgotten Work for Making Sense of Present-Day American Crises & Dilemmas
About the Prize
In the fall of 2018, we happened to find mention of an intriguingly-titled monograph on the sixth President of the United States by the late writer, critic, and translator Marion Mainwaring. (The reference appears on the back flap of a discarded copy of The Portrait Game, a little-known book based on a little-known collection in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France consisting of drawings of imaginary persons by the Russian writer Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev and subsequent character sketches composed by Turgenev and his friends—sketches translated and edited by Mainwaring, and published in English in 1973, a full 117 years after the group played their first round of “the portrait game” in Paris in 1856.) Mainwaring’s John Quincy Adams and Russia: A Sketch of Early Russian-American Relations as Recorded in the Papers of the Adams Family and Some of Their Contemporaries (1965) is now virtually impossible to find. The Institute is offering a $250 cash prize to the first person who can locate and deliver a copy of the book to the Institute by the last day of October 2018, in time for OICR’s “Readings for Now” Seminar #4, which will be devoted to a variety of works on “Russian-American Relations,” early and late. We will continue sponsoring this prize into the foreseeable future.
Winner of the First OICR Prize for the Redemption of the Most Illustrious Lost, Discarded, or Forgotten Work for Making Sense of Present-Day American Crises & Dilemmas
Cathy Denning, Marion Mainwaring’s John Quincy Adams and Russia: A Sketch of Early Russian-American Relations as Recorded in the Papers of the Adams Family and Some of Their Contemporaries (1965)
Winner of the Second OICR Prize for the Redemption of the Most Illustrious Lost, Discarded, or Forgotten Work for Making Sense of Present-Day American Crises & Dilemmas
Graham C. Parks, Count Agénor De Gasparin's The Uprising of a Great People: The United States in 1861 (Mary L. Booth, Trans.)
Image: Horace Greeley, The American conflict: a history of the great rebellion in the United States of America, 1860-'65: its causes, incidents, and results: intended to exhibit especially its moral and political phases, with the drift and progress of American opinion respecting human slavery from 1776 to the close of the war for the union. Illustrated by portraits on steel of generals, statesmen, and other eminent men; views of places of historic interest; maps, diagrams of battle-fields, naval actions, etc.; from official sources. 1867.
