The Jewel Merchants: A Comedy in One Act (1921) is a comic fantasy play by James Branch Cabell. Set in a world where history and fantasy collide, where a loyal Count can rise to defy the Duke he so diligently serves, The Jewel Merchants: A Comedy in One Act is included in a series of novels, essays, and poems known as the Biography of the Life of Manuel. “Am I to be welcomed merely for the sake of my gems? You were more gracious, you were more beautifully like your lovely name, on the fortunate day that I first encountered you … only six weeks ago, and only yonder, where the path crosses the highway. But now that I esteem myself your friend, you greet me like a stranger.” Roaming the hills on the outskirts of Florence, Graciosa, the lovely daughter of Balthazar Valori, encounters the jewel merchant Guido. Examining his wares, she is drawn to a magnificent set of pearls intended for Count Eglamore, a man who informed on her cousin Cibo, a man her family has sworn an oath to kill. Set in a fictionalized Tuscany of the Renaissance era, The Jewel Merchants: A Comedy in One Act is a captivating tale of jealousy, revenge, and the lengths to which a man will go for love. Cabell’s work has long been described as escapist, his novels and stories derided as fantastic and obsessive recreations of a world lost long ago. To read The Jewel Merchants: A Comedy in One Act, however, is to understand that the issues therein—the struggle for power, the unspoken distance between men and women—were vastly important not only at the time of its publication, but in our own, divisive world. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of James Branch Cabell’s The Jewel Merchants: A Comedy in One Act is a classic of fantasy and romance reimagined for modern readers.
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.
