Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War. Nancy Cunard, W.H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, etc. Published by Left Review, London, 1937. First Edition. Publisher’s yellow wrappers lettered in red, with the extremely scarce wraparound band present. Marginal spotting to a few pages, light spotting and toning to upper cover.

Published in London by the Left Review in 1937, ‘Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War’ stands as one of the most remarkable documents of literary political engagement from the interwar period.

The pamphlet emerged from a questionnaire circulated in June 1937, spearheaded by the American expatriate writer and activist Nancy Cunard, along with a group of fellow writers. The question posed to 148 British and Irish authors was stark and uncompromising: “Are you for, or against, the legal Government and the People of Republican Spain? Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism?” The results were overwhelmingly one-sided. Of the 148 published responses, 128 declared for the Spanish Republic, while only five openly sided against it . A further sixteen were relegated to an artificial “Neutral?” category, a designation that included such luminous names as T.S. Eliot, H.G. Wells, Ezra Pound & Sean O’Faolain.

Perhaps the most famous Irish response—and certainly the most memorably brief—came from Samuel Beckett. His contribution was the simple, defiant cry: ¡UPTHEREPUBLIC! Along with Beckett, the other Irish contributors include Liam O’Flaherty, George Bernard Shaw, Louis MacNeice, Ethel Manning and Sean O’Casey.