The Jewel Merchants (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): A Comedy in One Act

By James Branch Cabell

This 1921 play, subtitled "A Comedy in One Act," is Cabell's only published play script.  The drama is based on the short story "Balthazar's Daughter" that originally appeared in Cabell's 1916 collection, The Certain Hour.   In his prologue, the author confesses that the play "lacks moral fervor" and hopes it will "corrupt no reader irretrievably."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Mar 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411444331

James Branch Cabell

James Branch Cabell (1879-1958) was an American writer of escapist and fantasy fiction. Born into a wealthy family in the state of Virginia, Cabell attended the College of William and Mary, where he graduated in 1898 following a brief personal scandal. His first stories began to be published, launching a productive decade in which Cabell’s worked appeared in both Harper’s Monthly Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. Over the next forty years, Cabell would go on to publish fifty-two books, many of them novels and short-story collections. A friend, colleague, and inspiration for such writers as Ellen Glasgow, H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser, James Branch Cabell is remembered as an iconoclastic pioneer of fantasy literature.