LAMMING, George ~ In the Castle of my Skin.

FIRST UK PRINTING. Michael Joseph, London: 1953.

8vo., grey publisher's cloth, lettered typographically in white and gold to spine; in the unclipped pictorial dustwrapper (15s. net); with dustwrapper design, decorative purple endpapers, and frontis line drawing of the author all by West Indian Artist Denis Williams; THE BOOK near-fine, mild bumping to spine tips, with faint spotting to the outer edges of the text block; the very good DUSTWRAPPER with some even browning and spotting; creased along folds, with some nicking, chipping and short closed tears, particularly at spine tips; one 1cm closed tear to the lower panel; repaired internally with tape. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. First edition, first printing. The first, and widely-acclaimed autobiographical novel by the Barbadian writer George Lamming, which follows the events in a young boy's life living and growing up in the 1930s in Carrington Village, Barbados. Born in 1927, Lamming was encouraged to write by his teacher Frank Collymore, and after teaching for a number of years in Port of Spain, Trinidad, he travelled to London, where this novel was first published. It was journey, he believed, of necessity. "I had left home", he later wrote, "to make a career as a writer. This was a journey to an expectation, and between 1948 and 1960 every West Indian novelist of significance within their region made a similar journey". Championed by such writes as Jean-Paul Sartre, the novel later won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1957, and follows the coming-of-age story of a young boy, G, as he navigates the process of growing up against a backdrop of huge societal change. The title is derived from Derek Walcott's 'Epitaph for the Young' (1949): "You in the castle of your skin / I the swineherd." The book was a huge success, and praised by 'The Spectator' as "A striking piece of work, a rich and memorable feat of imaginative interpretation". A sequel, 'The Emigrants', followed in 1954. This first edition is much enhanced by the striking dust wrapper and endpaper design by Denis Williams, a fellow West Indian artist born in Guyana, who studied at the Camberwell School of Art in London in 1946 and lived in London for over ten years, teaching at both Central School of Art and the Slade School of Art. The author's debut novel, very scarce in this condition.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Near Fine
JACKET: Very Good