This is a rare, original, handwritten manuscript for the poem "A RHYME OF PROVINCETOWN NICKNAMES" by HARRY KEMP (American bohemian poet and prose writer known as the "Hobo Poet," "Tramp Poet," "Vagabond Poet," "Villon of America," and "the hero of adolescent Americans"). Complete manuscript with all 23 consecutive pages present; each page is hand-numbered at the top-left corner. The last page (23) is signed and dated as follows:  "Harry Kemp - Aug 6th 1946 / copied with a Seagull's feather." "The Provincetown Publishers" (the publishing company who published the poem in 1947 and 1954) is handwritten on the back of page 20. A regular visitor to the Greenwich Village scene, Kemp was friends with many of the Bohemian and progressive literary and cultural figures of his generation, including Eugene O'Neill, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Sinclair Lewis, Elbert Hubbard, and Ida Tarbell...he even camped on Upton Sinclair's property in 1911 (Sinclair's wife, Meta, became so enamored with Kemp that she ended up leaving him for the poet).

This is Kemp's original, handwritten manuscript of the poem from 1946. The poem was first published in 1947 within Volume I of the literary magazine "Provincetown Tideways." It was later published separately in booklet form in 1954. In the booklet's introduction, Kemp writes "These Rhymes came to me, springing into instant life, rough and prompt, like something out of sand and the sea; out of the very soil of Provincetown. Unlike the silly, prevalent School of Crossword Puzzle Poetry, which has taken in all the timid critics who say yes to them; being afraid to be left out on a limb if they say no - these rhymes are plain-spoken, and present an open meaning. The nicknames employed were already there, hundreds of them. I have invented none of them. Provincetown is The Town of A Thousand Nicknames."