Paul Bradshaw Bachtell — At Lucifer’s Portals and Other Verses

Paul Bradshaw Bachtell came of age in Lancaster, California, where a newspaper profile introduced the fifteen-year-old as a “child poet.” His sole book, At Lucifer’s Portals and Other Verses (1917), is an unruly Southern California miscellany: a long comic voyage across the Styx, evolutionary and religious argument, war protest, sentimental address, dialect humor, and poems retained from youth. This edition resets the complete book in its original order, restores its stanza shapes and meaningful indents from the source scan, and adds the securely attributed wartime poem “The Yank Behind the Gun” (1918).