LAMMING, George ~ The Emigrants.

FIRST UK PRINTING. Michael Joseph, London: 1954.

8vo., blue cloth lettered in white and gilt to spine with publisher's device to foot; together in the pictorial dustwrapper priced 15s. net to front flap; with dust wrapper illustration, decorative endpapers, and frontis line drawing of the author all by West Indian artist Denis Williams; THE BOOK very good plus, lightly bumped to spine tips and spotted to the outer edges of the text block; previous ownership in blue in to front free endpaper; the very good DUSTWRAPPER retaining much of its original vibrancy, however a little darkened and spotted, with chips and nicks to extremities and particularly ends of spine, with up to 1cm of loss at head, not affecting lettering. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. First UK edition, first printing of Lamming's acclaimed second novel. The Barbadian writer George Lamming had previously published his debut novel, 'In the Castle of my Skin', a semi-autobiographical tale 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 traveled to London, where this novel was first published (it also appeared in the U.S. by McGraw Hill). It was journey, the author 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, his debut 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. This, the sequel, followed a year later, and begins where the first ended. The plot of this second work follows a group of emigrants from the West Indies, setting out in search of a better life in England. "For some it means tragedy" the wrapper states, "for others disillusion, for yet others a new adjustment and a new self-knowledge... The Emigrants is a statement about man's life, the human condition." 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. Very scarce with the wrapper in any condition.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Very Good +
JACKET: Very Good