Part 7: Literary prize winners

Introduction

Collecting the first editions of literary prize winners is a popular avenue for a number of book collectors. Not only does the theme provide some guarantee that the books you collect will have some literary merit but a collection of prize-winning titles spanning a number of years can provide a fascinating insight into changing tastes over time. This instalment of the Guide looks at the increasing number of literary prizes on offer and some of the more collectable works within each.





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The Booker Prize

The Man Booker Prize is probably the world’s best known literary award and aims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. The prize, which was established by international food distribution company Booker McConnell, was launched in 1969 when the inaugural winner was P H Newby’s Something to Answer For. Whilst today the prize has the power to transform an author’s profile and transport them to the top of the bestseller lists, in those days it had a limited influence upon a book’s sales with Newby’s publishers Faber & Faber attributing just 1,800 copies of the novel’s total sales of 6,400 to the award. This relatively low print run means that it is one of the scarcer winning titles and you can now expect to pay between £150 and £200 for a copy of Something to Answer For in very good condition.

The award attracted some controversy, particularly in its early years. For example John Berger (whose novel G was the winner in 1972) used the award ceremony to criticise what he saw as the prize sponsors’ exploitation of foreign workers and gave half of his £5,000 prize money to the Black Panthers. Today the prize is worth ten times this amount. The award of the prize in 1982 to Schindler’s Ark by the Australian author Thomas Keneally was also criticised by some who considered that his narrative of the wartime exploits of industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved over 1,200 Polish Jews from Nazi concentration camps, was more a work of biography or history than fiction. Another controversial winner came in 1994 with How Late it Was, How Late by the Scottish author James Kelman. Written as a stream of conscious narrative in Glaswegian dialect and liberally interspersed with profanities, the work follows the fortunes of ex-convict and shoplifter Sammy. The subject matter and style of Kelman’s work did not prove universally popular with the judging panel with Rabbi Julia Neuberger threatening to resign if it won and branding it a “disgrace”. Kelman has since said that the negative publicity surrounding his win actually made publishers more reluctant to handle his work.

Some authors have been particularly favoured by the prize’s judging panel over the years with both the South African J M Coetzee and Australian Peter Carey winning it twice. Coetzee with Life and Times of Michael K in 1983 and Disgrace in 1999 and Carey with Oscar and Lucinda in 1988 and The True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001. The only other author to have won the prize more than once is J G Farrell, although here the circumstances were somewhat unusual. Farrell won the prize in 1973 with the second book in his Empire Trilogy, The Siege of Krishnapur. When it was originally launched the Booker was a prize that was awarded retrospectively. However, in 1971 the rules were changed so that it became a prize for the best novel in the year of publication and the award ceremony was moved from April to November. The upshot of this was that much of the fiction published during 1970 was never eligible to be considered. Forty years later, steps were taken to rectify this position and in May 2010 the Lost Man Booker Prize was awarded to the first novel in Farrell’s Empire Trilogy, The Troubles. Farrell, who drowned in Bantry Bay in Ireland in 1979, thus became the Prize’s only posthumous winner.

In terms of value the most expensive Booker winners for the collector to obtain are Stanley Middleton’s Holiday (which was co-winner in 1974 along with Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children which took the prize in 1981. Very good copies of either are worth between £400 and £600. Whilst Middleton was the author of over 40 well observed and realistic novels, evidence of changing reading tastes is provided by the fact that when the Sunday Times sent the opening chapter of Holiday to 21 leading publishers and literary agents in 2006, all but one of the responses was a rejection. Midnight’s Children on the other hand was also voted as the Best of the Booker in 2008 – a one-off award to celebrate the Prize’s fortieth anniversary.

In addition to collecting the winning titles (a full set of which would cost around £2,500), some try to amass a set of the shortlisted titles as well. The shortlist, which is usually announced in September, has contained some gems over the years with the most valuable shortlisted titles being Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot (which lost out to Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac in 1984 and Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (both of which are worth between £150 and £200).

The Costa Book Awards

The Costa Book Awards (which started life in 1971 as the Whitbread Literary Awards) are a more populist competitor to the Booker Prize. Awards are given in five categories – best novel, best first novel, children’s book, poetry and biography.

The inaugural novel of the year award was won by Gerda Charles for her fifth and final novel The Destiny Waltz. In 1985 an overall Book of the Year award was introduced, and recent winners of this accolade include Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (in 2003) and Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass (2001).

The Orange Prize for Fiction

A relatively new addition to the plethora of literary prizes is the Orange Prize for Fiction, which was launched in 1996. The prize differs from the others considered here in that it is only open to female authors. Although the author can be of any nationality, their work must have been published in English in the United Kingdom within the preceding year. The award was a response to the view amongst some women writers that their work was being overlooked by the other major literary awards, a belief that was prompted in part by the all-male shortlist for the 1991 Booker Prize. However, the rationale for the prize has not been without its critics.  The 1990 Booker winner AS Byatt has described it as a “sexist prize” whilst Germaine Greer complained that soon there would be a prize for writers with red hair. Nevertheless, the prize can have a significant impact upon a book’s sales. Sales of Helen Dunmore’s A Spell of Winter quadrupled after winning the inaugural prize whilst Andrea Levy’s Small Island, which won in 2004, sold over 1 million copies, outstripping the Booker Prize winner that year (Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty). Small Island was also named the “Orange of Oranges” in 2005, as being the best novel of the first decade of the prize and, with it having formed the basis of a BBC drama in 2009, copies in fine condition are now worth upwards of £50.

The Pulitzer Prize

The leading American literary award, the Pulitzer Prize, was established by Joseph Pulitzer the Hungarian émigré journalist and publisher of The St Louis Post Dispatch and New York World newspapers. Following his death in 1911, Pulitzer left $2 million in his will to Columbia University and part of this was used to set up the prize fund, which the university administers. Whilst the majority of prizes are awarded for excellence in newspaper journalism, the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (renamed the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948) is awarded for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.

The prize was first awarded in 1918 to His Family by Ernest Poole. The following year the winner was The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington, which is probably better known today as the basis for Orson Welles’ 1942 film. Tarkington was to win the prize a second time in 1922 for Alice Adams, which is a distinction he shares with William Faulkner (a winner in 1955 for A Fable and in 1963 for his final novel The Reivers) and John Updike (for the third and fourth novels in his Rabbit series Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest). Other well-known winners include Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence in 1921 and Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell in 1937.

National Book Award

Another leading American literary prize is the National Book Award, which was established in 1950 by a consortium of book publishing groups with the aims of enhancing the public’s awareness of exceptional books written by American authors and increasing the popularity of reading in general. Awards are given in four categories – fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children’s fiction. The inaugural winner of the fiction award was Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (which formed the basis of the 1955 film starring Frank Sinatra). Saul Bellow has won the award an unrivalled three times in three different decades in 1954 (The Adventures of Augie March), 1965 (Herzog) and 1971 (Mr Sammler’s Planet).

James Tait Black Memorial Prize

The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are Britain’s oldest literary prizes, dating back to 1919. They were founded in memory of James Tait Black, a partner in the publishing house A&C Black, and are administered by the University of Edinburgh. Unlike other prizes, which tend to have a sponsor and a panel of celebrity judges, the winners are chosen by the university’s Professor of English Literature, who is assisted in the shortlisting stage by PhD students. This method seems to have proved a successful formula over the years with the list of previous winners containing classics of English literature such as EM Forster’s A Passage to India and Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms rubbing shoulders with popular genre works such as CS Foresters’ second Hornblower novel A Ship of the Line and John le Carré’s George Smiley novel The Honourable Schoolboy and edgier recent works such as David Peace’s GB84.

The CWA Gold Dagger

Whilst the awards we have considered so far are primarily given to works of literary fiction, some leading prizes are reserved for genre works. For example, the Crime Writers’ Association bestows its Gold Dagger Award on the best crime novel of the year. This award was launched in 1955, two years after the CWA was founded by John Creasey, and for the first five years of its existence the prize rejoiced under the title of the Crossed Red Herring Award. The first winner was Winston Graham’s The Little Walls. Some notable winners over the years have included Colin Dexter (for The Wench is Dead in 1989 and The Way Through the Woods in 1992), Dick Francis (for Whip Hand in 1979) and John le Carré (for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in 1963 and The Honourable Schoolboy in 1977).

Hugo Awards

The Hugo Awards, named after the founder of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories Hugo Gernsback, are presented for the best science fiction or fantasy work of the previous year. The awards have been presented in a number of categories since 1953 with the results being decided by a vote of members of the World Science Fiction Society. The winner of the inaugural Hugo for best novel was The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester. Robert A Heinlein has received the most Hugos for best novel with five wins (which included Starship Troopers in 1960) whilst other winners which may be familiar to the wider reading public include  Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle in 1963 (an alternate history envisaging a world where the Axis forces have won the Second World War), William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1985 and J K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 2001.

Part 8: Spy Fiction

Part 6: Contemporary fiction 1975 - present

Introduction

Whereas the majority of titles that we have looked at in the preceding instalments of this guide have established their place in the literary canon through a combination of critical consensus and enduring popularity, the situation is less certain when we come to contemporary fiction. New authors can rapidly attract the attentions of collectors on the back of an acclaimed debut but, if subsequent efforts fail to satisfy the expectations that have been built up, then the value of the preceding works may well be reassessed. As a recent example Adam Thirlwell was included in Granta’s 2003 list of young British novelists on the strength of his debut work Politics, published later that year, which was generally well-received. However his non-fiction follow up, Miss Herbert, received something of a savaging at the hands of the critics (most notably in The Observer and The Times). Whilst many of the works featured here represent the efforts of well-regarded novelists writing at the peak of their powers, it’s impossible to say with any certainty that they will be as well thought of or influential 25 or 50 years from now.

Eighties Excess

The promotion of free market values by the Thatcher and Reagan administrations in Britain and America during the 1980s helped to foster a more materialistic culture with the focus being much more on individual gain rather than the common good. Two novels which encapsulate (or rather satirise) the values of this period are Martin Amis’ Money and Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Money, published by Cape in 1984, is the story of John Self (who, as a director of television commercials, holds a quintessentially 1980s position) and his attempts to get his first feature film off the ground. Self is the embodiment of consumerism and hedonism – constantly smoking (“Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette”), drinking and eating to excess and spending copious amounts on prostitutes and pornography. Spending just under 400 pages in the company of the boorish and violent Self ought not to be an enjoyable or engaging experience but, thanks to the exuberance and outrageous humour of Amis’ prose, together with Self’s undeluded recognition of his multitude of faults, it is. Copies of the first edition are usually priced between £30 and £40.

The protagonist of The Bonfire of the Vanities – Sherman McCoy – is also an embodiment of the ideals of the time. McCoy is a millionaire bond trader who regards himself as a “Master of the Universe”. However, despite his wealth and privileged position, an encounter with two young black men, after taking a wrong turn into the Bronx whilst driving into Manhattan with his mistress, sows the seeds of his downfall. Whilst Wolfe had written a series of highly regarded non-fiction works based upon his journalism, The Bonfire of the Vanities was his first novel. It was originally serialised in 27 instalments in Rolling Stone magazine, starting in 1984 before being heavily revised for publication in novel form in 1987 becoming an instant bestseller.

Religious Fundamentalism

Whilst a number of works in the immediate post-war period (such as Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter and Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited) were written from an expressly Catholic standpoint, novels with an overtly religious theme are much less common today. However, this is not to say that authors do not continue to explore the influence of religion in today’s more secular society.

One example is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Set in the near future it depicts a totalitarian state, the Republic of Gilead, which has been established following the overthrow of the United States government in a military coup. The theocratic dictatorship demands adherence to a strict set of rules drawn from the Old Testament with harsh punishments for anyone who transgresses. Dwindling birth rates and the high incidence of birth deformities (caused by disease, radiation and pollution) mean that children are a prized rarity. In response to this, a class of fertile women (termed the “handmaids”) has been created whose sole purpose is to serve as concubines to the members of the male ruling elite (the “commanders”) and bear them children. This practice takes its authority from the story of Rachel and Leah in the book of Genesis and The Handmaid’s Tale generally is a warning of the loss of individual freedom that can result from a fundamentalist interpretation of religious texts. The Handmaid’s Tale was awarded the 1986 Booker Prize and the true first edition (published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart) is worth up to £40.

The most notorious example of religious debate engendered by a work of fiction in recent years has to be that generated by the publication of Salman Rushdie’s fourth novel The Satanic Verses in 1988. Rushdie’s inclusion of some fictionalised references to Islamic history in the book (the title of which refers to some apparently pagan verses from the Qu’ran alleged by some to have been uttered by the prophet Muhammad) was regarded by many Muslims as blasphemous. The ensuing furore led to the book being banned in Muslim countries and burned in demonstrations in the United Kingdom. The most extreme reaction came from Iran whose leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on all Muslims to kill Rushdie and his publishers - a move which resulted in Rushdie being placed under police protection and going into hiding.  The controversy highlighted the contrast between the Western value of freedom of expression and the Muslim belief that no-one should disparage the founder of Islam.

Death

Benjamin Franklin famously classed death (along with taxes) as being one of the certainties of life. Whilst the latter has formed the basis of few notable novels, death has certainly provided the inspiration for many authors throughout literary history.

Ian McEwan is a significant author of the contemporary period whose novels – particularly his earlier works - focus heavily on death. The Cement Garden, published in 1978, looks at the coping mechanisms that four children employ to come to terms with the deaths of first their father (who suffers a heart attack whilst attempting to concrete over the garden of the family home) and then their bedridden mother. Either through an inability to confront the situation or to avoid being taken into care, they bury the mother in a trunk in the cellar and encase her body with the remaining concrete. As the school holidays start they begin to exhibit increasingly strange and dark behaviours in their isolation from the rest of the world. With The Cement Garden being McEwan’s debut novel, you would need to part with between £200 and £300 to obtain a copy in its dustjacket depicting weeds growing through cracked cement.

The two central characters of Don DeLillo’s White Noise – Jack Gladney and his wife Babette – are preoccupied with the thought of death, each having a horror of dying before the other and being left alone. Whilst both are in healthy middle age at the outset of the novel, Gladney’s exposure to a “toxic airborne event” following a chemical spill at the nearby railway freight depot leaves him feeling that he is living under a death sentence whilst Babette resorts to participating in trials for an experimental drug that has been developed to reduce the fear of dying. White Noise was DeLillo’s eighth novel and the one that brought him to the attention of a wider audience. In part it is a contemplation of modern society’s fear of death despite of our increasing longevity. It is also an effective satire on other contemporary phenomena, including consumerism (DeLillo originally intended to call the book “Panasonic”) and academic life (Gladney has established the field of “Hitler studies” although suffers insecurities over his inability to speak German).

Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road, deals with death on a much bigger scale depicting a post-apocalyptic America, which has been reduced to a burnt-out wasteland by some unspecified disaster. Two characters - an unnamed man and his young son - travel on foot towards the coast in search of the remnants of humanity, surviving by scavenging for tinned food and avoiding those other survivors who have reverted to a feral state and turned to enslaving and eating those who are weaker. Although the novel highlight’s man’s dogged attempts to survive even the most hostile environments, it offers a bleak and harrowing vision of the future of humanity. 

The “Great American Novel”

Whilst it is an overused term, a number of major novels published during the contemporary period can lay claim to falling into this category through capturing something of the American Zeitgeist with two particularly worthy candidates being Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.

Published in 1985, Blood Meridian is based upon historical events which took place between 1848-51 and follows the fortunes of “the Kid” a 14-year old Tennessean who has run away from home. In search of adventure, he falls in with a band of mercenaries led by Captain White who are seeking to continue the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. After surviving the slaughter of White’s group by Comanche the Kid joins the Glanton Gang, a notorious group of scalp hunters who are hired by the Mexican authorities to clear the border area of Indians. As the novel progresses, the gang turns from the officially sanctioned slaughter of Indians to the killing of Mexicans, and the narrative becomes an unflinching account of the gang’s descent into increasing violence and depravity, the hellish quality of which is enhanced by McCarthy’s poetic use of language. Essentially the novel provides a nihilistic alternative to the usual heroic vision of the birth of the American West.

Although it attracted little attention at the time of publication, Blood Meridian’s critical reputation has increased significantly in the intervening years and in 2006 it was placed third in a poll of authors and publishers conducted by The New York Times Magazine to list the greatest novels of the previous 25 years. Today you could expect to pay over £1,000 for a copy of the American first edition in very good condition.

American Pastoral is set in the much more recent past, spanning the social and political upheaval of the late sixties, through Watergate up until the 1990s. Narrated by Philip Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, the novel follows the fortunes of successful high school athlete and businessman Seymour “Swede” Levov whose comfortable existence is thrown into turmoil after his daughter becomes radicalised by the Vietnam war and plants a bomb in a local post office. The novel, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, draws parallels between the manner in which a comfortable, successful life can be ruined with the evaporation of America’s post war optimism.

Multiculturalism

Another significant theme of the contemporary British novel is the exploration of the increasing diversity of our society. Whereas in a previous era, novelists such as EM Forster wrote about our attitudes towards the colonies, now a number of leading novelists write about the experiences of immigrants and their descendants in this country. A notable example of this is Zadie Smith’s White Teeth which depicts characters from a range of cultures (including Jamaican, Bangladeshi and white British) and religions (including Jewish, Islamic and Jehovah’s Witness). Rather than resorting to stereotypical portraits, the novel presents the qualities and negative aspects of the various cultures as well as the conflict that immigrants experience between preserving their traditions and assimilating into the new society. 

CONTEMPORARY FICTION: 1975-present – SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

A guide to current values of first editions in Very Good condition (with dustjackets).

McEwan, Ian: THE CEMENT GARDEN

            (Jonathan Cape, 1978)......................................................£20-£40 (£200-£300)

Amis, Martin: MONEY

            (Jonathan Cape, 1984).............................................................£6-£8 (£30-£40)

Atwood, Margaret: THE HANDMAID’S TALE

(McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1985)…...….……....................£8-£10 (£30-£40)

Ditto (Jonathan Cape, 1986)…………….....................................£3-£5 (£20-£25)

DeLillo, Don: WHITE NOISE

(Viking, US, 1985)…….…………………...….………................£12-£15 (£70-£80)

Ditto (Picador, 1985)….………………....................................£10-£12 (£50-£60)

McCarthy, Cormac: BLOOD MERIDIAN

(Random House, US, 1985).………...........................£150-£200 (£1,000-£1,100)

Ditto (Picador, 1989)……..……..........................................£25-£30 (£200-£225)

Wolfe, Tom: THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES

(Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, US, 1987)…...………........................£5-£8 (£15-£20)

Ditto (Jonathan Cape, 1987)….……….......................................£5-£8 (£15-£20)

Rushdie, Salman: THE SATANIC VERSES

            (Viking, 1988)......................................................................£10-£12 (£40-£50)

Roth, Philip: AMERICAN PASTORAL

(Houghton Mifflin, US, 1997).……….........................................£8-£10 (£30-£40)

Ditto (Jonathan Cape, 1997)………..........................................£8-£10 (£20-£25)

Smith, Zadie: WHITE TEETH

            (Hamish Hamilton, 2000)..........................................................£5-£8 (£15-£20)

McCarthy, Cormac: THE ROAD

(Knopf, US, 2006)..…..….……….............................................£8-£10 (£20-£25)

Ditto (Picador, 2006)……………............................................£12-£15 (£75-£80)

Part 7: Literary prize winners

Part 5: Post-war fiction 1945-1975

Introduction

In addition to forming the subject matter of several key works of fiction, the Second World War was a catalyst for a number of significant social changes which were reflected in the literature from this time. Publishers from this period were also more alive to the potential of the dust jacket as a marketing tool with the result that more effort was expended on their design and they were more likely to be retained by readers meaning that jacketed copies should be easier to track down by today’s collectors of modern fiction.

World War 2

Like the Great War, the Second World War forms the subject matter of many enduring works of fiction, a notable example being Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. After being drafted into the US army Mailer served in the Philippines and his experiences provided the material for the novel which is set on the South Pacific island of Anopopei where General Cummings’ force is attempting to drive out the Japanese. The novel focuses on the varied characters in a reconnaissance platoon sent on a mission behind enemy lines and is an engaging study of the tensions that can arise between men in a war situation, capturing both the intensity of combat and the boredom of the intervening lulls.

Joseph Heller also saw active service flying 60 combat missions as a bombardier in a B-25 with the US Air Corps and drew upon these experiences in his debut novel Catch-22. The exploits of the novel’s central character, Captain John Yossarian, contain a strong autobiographical element with the central theme being Yossarian’s increasingly desperate attempts to avoid flying any more missions using a variety of ruses such as pretending to be insane. The novel is populated with a large cast of absurd characters including Milo Minderbinder, the mess officer and war profiteer, who is a satire on the capitalist ideal taken to extremes, at one point even hiring out his planes to the Germans to enable them to bomb his own airfield. The book’s title has entered common usage as a term meaning a “no-win” situation several examples of which appear in the book. The most notable of these is that Yossarian’s attempts to avoid combat missions by feigning mental instability prove that he is thinking rationally in order to avoid danger and is therefore sane and must continue to fly.

Graham Greene

Graham Greene was undoubtedly one of the leading literary figures from the last century and one who managed to achieve both critical acclaim and high sales. Whilst his 26 novels were published in a period that spans from 1929 to 1988, 10 of these appeared during the period under consideration here.

As a boy Greene attended Berkhamstead School where his father Charles was the Second Master. His experiences in being required to move between the worlds of the pupils and the teaching staff undoubtedly influenced his work with many of his novels dealing with the themes of divided loyalties and betrayal. A good example of this is The Third Man, published in 1949. Here pulp western novelist Rollo Martins travels to war-torn Vienna at the request of his former school friend Harry Lime. Upon arriving he is informed by the authorities that Lime is engaged in black market activities and, whilst he initially disbelieves this, he eventually has to make a decision as to which side to take. The Third Man was unusual for having originally been written as a preliminary for Greene’s work on the screenplay for Carol Reed’s classic film. There are a number of differences between the film and Greene’s novella, including the change of Lime’s nationality from English to American to accommodate the film’s star Orson Welles. The English first, published by Heinemann, also features the short story The Fallen Idol and is today worth up to £400. Green’s subsequent works become progressively cheaper and easier to obtain such that The Honorary Consul (published in 1973) can be had for under £60.

The “Angry Young Men”

One of the social changes that became apparent after the war was an increased dissatisfaction amongst the young with the established social order. In Britain, this trend manifested itself in the form of the “Angry Young Men”. Whilst the terms drew it’s origins from the promotion for John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, it came to be applied as a loose term encompassing the works of a number of young writers which seemed to express disillusionment with traditional society.

Prominent among these was Kingsley Amis, whose debut novel Lucky Jim, was published by Gollancz in 1954. The novel’s protagonist Jim Dixon is a lecturer in medieval history at an unnamed provincial university, and it takes the form of a satire on academic life. Initially Dixon, who is a grammar school-educated working class boy, struggles to fit in with the conventions of his middle class existence but eventually comes to see though its pretensions and pomposity. Like Greene, Amis enjoyed a long career as an author, publishing more than 20 novels before his death in 1995 although his later works were increasingly characterised by a more conservative viewpoint than that expressed in Lucky Jim. By this time his literary mantle had been taken on by his son Martin, whose debut work The Rachel Papers was published in 1973.

Many of the other writers who (often unwillingly) were labelled “Angry Young Men” produced novels that contained a strong element of social realism in their depictions of working class life and, as such, had much in common with the “kitchen sink” dramas of Arnold Wesker and Shelagh Delaney. For example, Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning focuses on the drinking and sexual exploits of Arthur Seaton, a young lathe operator at a bicycle factory in Nottingham. Similarly, the principal character of David Storey’s This Sporting Life is also a lathe operator named Arthur Machin who lives in an unnamed Northern city. However, Machin’s size and athleticism enable him to rise above his contemporaries and carve out a lucrative existence as a rugby league forward, until the day when he starts to feel his age catching up on him. The authenticity of This Sporting Life is heightened by the fact that Storey himself spent four seasons playing professional rugby league and the collectability of both these novels has been enhanced by their forming the basis of iconic films starring Albert Finney and Richard Harris respectively.

The Beat Generation

In America, nonconformist attitudes found literary expression in the works of the “Beat Generation” whose leading novelists were Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Kerouac’s best known work On the Road details a trans-American road trip that Kerouac took with his friend Neil Cassady. Kerouac originally wrote the novel in an intensive three-week writing session in the spring of 1951, typing the manuscript onto a series of sixteen-foot long rolls of paper that he had found in his loft. The book was finally published in 1957 by Viking and today a jacketed copy of the US first can fetch a healthy £3,000. However, the book’s value as a cultural icon can be judged by the fact that when Kerouac’s original manuscript scroll was auctioned by Christie’s in May 2001 the owner of the Indianapolis Colts American football team Jim Irsay paid an astounding $2,200,000.

Burroughs’ most famous work The Naked Lunch defies easy categorisation being an amalgam of many disparate elements including drug-induced hallucinatory episodes, bizarre sexual fantasies, wildly inventive science fiction and hard-boiled crime. This variety of styles, and the non-linear nature of the narrative, derive largely from the fact that the work was composed using the “cut up technique” whereby Burroughs recombined a number of separate manuscript passages that he had brought with him to Paris in 1958 for publication by Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press.

Both Kerouac and Burroughs were known for their dissolute lifestyles, Kerouac dying from internal bleeding caused by alcohol abuse in 1969 aged 47 whilst Burroughs, a long-term heroin addict, perversely lived to a ripe old age of 83 until his death in 1997.

Dystopias

Whilst novels imagining a future world where people’s actions are governed by a repressive and authoritarian government are a feature of many ages (earlier examples include Trollope’s The Fixed Period and Jack London’s The Iron Heel) two celebrated examples of this genre were published in the post-war period.

Perhaps the best known of these is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which follows the attempts of Winston Smith to break free of the totalitarian influence of “the Party” and assert his freedom to think and pursue a love affair with his work colleague at the Ministry of Truth Julia. Orwell envisions a world where the state controls every elements of human life through a potent combination of relentless propaganda, mind control (exercised through techniques such a limiting vocabulary) and continuous surveillance (even spying on its citizens though their television screens). The novel’s popularity and influence is such that many of the phrases that appear in it - such as “Big Brother” (the Party’s public face) and “doublethink” - have entered common usage.  

Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange envisions a new future where the younger generation is out of control. The principal character, fifteen year old Alex, spends his time drinking drug-laced milk and alcohol in bars before roaming the streets with his gang beating up random passers by, robbing shops, burgling houses and raping the occupants. After being caught Alex is subjected to an experimental form of aversion therapy to rid him of his violent impulses.

Burgess wrote the A Clockwork Orange in 1959-60 during a period of intense creativity after he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour and (mistakenly) only given a year to live with the intention that his widow would be able to live off the royalties. Eventually published in the UK by Heinemann in 1962, the novel gained greater prominence following the release of Stanley Kubrik’s film version nine years later. The film’s bleak ending stems from the fact that it was based upon the US version of the novel, which omits the final chapter in which Alex starts to yearn for a more settled existence with a wife and family. Burgess claims that the chapter was dropped at the suggestion of Eric Swenson, vice-president of his US publishers W W Norton – possibly the first time a publisher has demanded greater pessimism for the American market!

The central theme of A Clockwork Orange is the question of whether it is better for a person to be able to choose to perform evil acts or be compelled to perform good ones. The choice between good and evil also forms the basis of another key work from this period with dystopian elements – William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Here a group of schoolboys are marooned on a deserted island following a plane crash. In the absence of any adults they set about forming their own society, although conflicting factions arise led by the liberal Ralph and the autocratic Jack. The ensuing descent into savagery reflects Golding’s pessimistic view that, in the absence of order and constraint, man’s brutal and violent impulses will triumph.

POST-WAR FICTION: 1945-1975 – SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

A guide to current values of first editions in Very Good condition (with dust jackets).

Mailer, Norman: THE NAKED AND THE DEAD

(Rinehart, US, 1948)…….…………………............................£30-£40 (£300-£400)

Ditto (Allan Wingate, 1949)………………...............................£10-£15 (£50-£100)

Orwell, George: NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

(Secker & Warburg, 1949)…….………………….......................£60-£80 (£1,000+)

Ditto (Harcourt Brace, US, 1949)……………………........…......£20-£30 (£80-£100)

Greene, Graham: THE THIRD MAN & THE FALLEN IDOL

            (Heinemann, 1950).............................................................£30-£40 (£300-£400)

Amis, Kingsley: LUCKY JIM

(Gollancz, 1953 [1954])…….……..………………….......£200-£300 (£2,500-£3,000)

Golding, William: LORD OF THE FLIES

(Faber & Faber, 1954).…....…..………………….….......£300-£400 (£2,500-£4,000)

Kerouac, Jack: ON THE ROAD

(Viking, US, 1957)…….………………..........................£400-£600 (£2,000-£3,000)

Ditto (Andre Deutsch, 1958)(1^st issue, author’s photo on

rear dust-jacket flap)……………………….................…......£100-£150 (£600-£800)

Sillitoe, Alan: SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING

(W.H. Allen, 1958)…….…………….…………….…................£30-£40 (£400-£600)

Burroughs, William: THE NAKED LUNCH

(Olympia Press, Paris, 1959)(1^st issue, green border on title page,

“Francs 1500” on rear dust-jacket, wrappers)…............£200-£300 (£1,000-£1,250)

Storey, David: THIS SPORTING LIFE

(Longmans, 1960)…….………………………….................... £20-£30 (£100-£150)

Heller, Joseph: CATCH-22

(Simon & Schuster, US, 1961).…………….......................£100-£150 (£600-£700)

Ditto (Jonathan Cape, 1962)………….……...........................£20-£30 (£150-£200)

Burgess, Anthony: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

            (Heinemann, 1962).……….........…….................…………£100-£125 (£700-£900)

Amis, Martin: THE RACHEL PAPERS

            (Jonathan Cape, 1973)........................................................£25-£35 (£200-£300)

Greene, Graham: THE HONORARY CONSUL

            (The Bodley Head, 1973)..........................................................£8-£10 (£40-£60)

Part 6: Contemporary fiction from 1975 to the present

Part 4: From World War I to World War II 1920-1945

Introduction

Part 4 of this series covers the period running from 1920 up until the end of World War II in 1945. Works from this era span a wide variety of themes including a reaction against the horrors of the Great War, years of economic boom and bust, the rise of communism and fascism as political forces and the development of modernism as a literary movement. 

The Great War

Whilst the work of the war poets (including Rupert Brooke and Wilfrid Owen, neither of whom lived to see the Armistice) provided a more immediate literary reaction against the slaughter of the Great War, over a decade was to elapse before lengthier treatments of the subject began to appear. For example, Robert Graves’ autobiographical Good-bye to All That was published in 1929. Whilst the book covers Graves’ childhood and school years, a large portion of the narrative concerns his war experiences with detailed and vivid descriptions of trench warfare, including the Battle of Loos, coming under enemy fire and gas attacks. The following year Graves’ friend Siegfried Sassoon published the second instalment of his fictionalised autobiographical “Sherston Trilogy”, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. This follows Sassoon’s alter ego George Sherston from army training school through his experiences in the trenches between 1916 and 1917 to his eventual hospitalisation for shell shock. The novel gives an alternative perspective to many of the events described in Good-bye to All That. This, plus Graves’ unauthorised inclusion in his book of a poem that Sassoon had sent to him in a letter, was a cause of the two authors and former comrades in arms falling out. The book was recalled and Sassoon’s poem is excised from later editions of Good-bye to All That and replaced by asterisks.

Ernest Hemingway adopted a similar fictionalised approach to his semi-autobiographical A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929. Like Hemingway, the novel’s protagonist Frederic Henry is an American who serves as an ambulance driver in the Italian army. The story sets the doomed romance between Henry and an English nurse Catherine Barkley against the broader background of the larger scale tragedy of the conflict. Hemingway was to return to the theme of war with his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls which tells the story of another young America Robert Jordan who is serving with the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.

Virginia Woolf and The Bloomsbury Group

One of the leading figures of modernist literature during the interwar years was Virginia Woolf. Woolf was also a leading light of the informal group of writers, intellectuals and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group that lived or worked in that area of London during the first half of the twentieth century and which also included John Maynard Keynes, E M Forster and Lytton Strachey.

Woolf’s reputation is largely based upon two stylistically innovative novels – Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse – that she published through her own imprint, The Hogarth Press, which she established with her husband Leonard in 1917. Mrs Dalloway details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she makes preparations to host a party that evening. Although the events described occupy a single day, there are frequent flashbacks and use of the “stream of consciousness” technique to document the momentary inner thoughts of the characters. Owing to these structural and stylistic similarities, Mrs Dalloway is thought by some to be a response to James Joyce’s Ulysses which was published in 1922. Ulysses also concentrates on the events of one day – 16 June 1904 - chronicling Leopold Bloom’s activities in Dublin. Woolf was known to be an admirer of Ulysses describing its cemetery scene as a “masterpiece”. Mrs Dalloway was published three years after Ulysses in May 1925 in an edition of 2,000 copies.

To the Lighthouse, published in 1927, describes the Ramsey family, plus assorted friends and acquaintances, taking a vacation in their holiday home on the island of Skye. With the outbreak of the Great War and various misfortunes that befall the family, the home lies empty for a decade years before some of the surviving characters reassemble at the house in the novel’s concluding section. Again, Woolf’s focus is on revealing the characters’ thoughts and feelings. Woolf conceived of the novel during one of her regular walks around Bloomsbury’s Tavistock Square where she lived at number 52 between 1924 and 1939 and a bust has been erected near her former home by the Virginia Woolf Society to commemorate this event. 

The dustjackets for both Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse were designed by Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell and their simple designs painted in black, offset with one subdued colour, did much to establish The Hogarth Press’ visual identity. Jacketed copies command a premium price at auction – for example in October 2009 a jacketed copy of Mrs Dalloway fetched $18,000 at Swann Galleries in New York.

The “Bright Young Things”

Following the end of the Great War, the 1920s were a period during which economic and industrial development soared and jazz music and dancing became popular. The “Roaring Twenties” were a time during which a small group of young aristocrats and socialites were able to throw lavish parties, drink heavily and generally enjoy hedonistic lifestyles from which a number of writers drew inspiration with differing approaches to the subject matter.

P G Wodehouse’s novels from this period focus upon the foibles of the upper classes with his Jeeves and Wooster series of comic masterpieces being particularly sought after by collectors. After rising late the indolent and slow witted - yet generous and good natured - aristocrat Bertie Wooster spends a largely carefree existence at his club - the Drones – or staying with friends and relatives at their country houses. However, he is regularly reliant upon the efforts of his resourceful and intelligent “gentleman’s personal gentleman” Jeeves to extricate him from a series of awkward and difficult situations. One particularly amusing Jeeves and Wooster story “The Purity of the Turf” appears in The Inimitable Jeeves, published in 1925 where the pair seek to profit by gambling upon on the events at a village school fete. Much of the amusement in these stories derives from Jeeves’ marvellously understated responses to his younger master.

The humour in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies, which takes as its subject matter the group of wealthy socialites known as the “Bright Young Things” is more satirical in nature. It follows the exploits of aspiring novelist Adam Symes and his on-off engagement to fiancée Nina Blount. A number of humorous incidents arise, particularly after Symes finds employment writing the Society column for the “Daily Excess”. He uses the column for his own amusement as a vehicle to popularise the wearing of green bowler hats and the creation of fictitious stars of the social scene such as “Count Cincinatti”. The later sections of the novel, thought to have been written after the break up of Waugh’s marriage, take on a much darker tone. Vile Bodies was published in 1930, the year that Waugh converted to Catholicism and this is an influence that becomes more apparent in his subsequent works such as Brideshead Revisited (1945).

In America, the decadence and materialism of this period is captured in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Great Gatsby published in 1925. Here the shallow and amoral Buchanans (who represent the “old aristocracy”) are contrasted with the ambiguous character of the enigmatic Jay Gatsby who, having made his fortune through bootlegging, holds extravagant parties at his Long Island mansion. The dustjacket of the American first edition is a particularly celebrated piece of jacket art with Francis Cugat’s Art Deco-style image depicting a pair of disembodied woman’s eyes and mouth hovering in the night sky over the lights of an amusement park. A closer inspection of the pupils reveals a pair of tiny reclining nude figures. Ironically for a work that questions materialistic values, the presence of this jacket can add tremendously to the value of this sought after title with copies fetching up to £90,000.

The Depression

The boom years ended when the economies of the Western World suffered a spectacular downturn following the Wall Street stock market crash of October 1929, which signalled the start of a 10-year slump. In the American Mid West this depression was exacerbated by the “dust bowl” conditions that were created by a combination of drought and unecological agricultural practices which rendered vast areas of farmland useless.

One of the key works to emerge from this period was John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath which describes the plight of the Joad family who, after their farm in Oklahoma is repossessed, set out for California lured by the promise of work on the fruit farms. Upon arriving in California they find that there is an oversupply of migrant labour and the workers are attempting to form unions to protect themselves from exploitation. The novel was published in 1939 and gained Steinbeck the Pulitzer prize the following year. From a European perspective, the poverty suffered by many during this period was documented in George Orwell’s first full length work Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933, which describes his experiences working in poorly paid jobs in restaurant kitchens in Paris and, following his return to England, living rough on the streets. Today this title, which was issued by Gollancz in an edition of 1,500 copies is one the most valuable of Orwell’s works with jacketed copies fetching upwards of £2,500.



The Rise of Totalitarianism

The harsh economic conditions were one of the factors that led to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany with Hitler becoming Chancellor in 1933. This period is captured in Christopher Isherwood’s short novel Goodbye to Berlin. Although it was first published by The Hogarth Press in 1939, it is set in the period 1930 to 1933 and its cast of characters, which include the Jewish heiress Natalia and gay couple Peter and Otto, features a number of individuals who would face persecution at the hands of the Nazis.

Following the Russian Revolution in 1917 and particularly after Lenin’s death in 1924, the communist regime under Stalin took the Soviet Union down a similar path towards totalitarianism. This period of Soviet history forms the basis of Orwell’s memorable allegory Animal Farm. After overthrowing their human masters on the farm, the animals’ revolutionary ideals are betrayed by wickedness and greed as the tyrannical Napoleon, a fierce Berkshire pig, establishes himself as dictator. The novel was published in August 1945 just over 3 months after the end of the Second World War in Europe and, as such, was one of the first works to be critical of our wartime Soviet allies. The subsequent Cold War was to have a significant influence on literature in the post-war period, particularly in the spy fiction genre. 

FROM WORLD WAR I TO WORLD WAR II: 1920-1945 – SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

A guide to current values of first editions in Very Good condition (with dustjackets).

Joyce, James: ULYSSES

            (Shakespeare and Company, Paris, 1922) (First printing, copies 1-100 printed on

            Dutch handmade paper, signed by the author)................................…£100,000+

Wodehouse, P.G.: THE INIMITABLE JEEVES

(Herbert Jenkins, 1923)…….…………………………......£80-£100 (£1,000-£1,500)

Ditto as JEEVES (George H. Doran, US, 1923)…..…...£80-£100 (£1,000-£1,500)

Fitzgerald, F. Scott: THE GREAT GATSBY

(Scribner’s, US, 1925)(First issue)….…..….......£2,000-£3,000 (£50,000-£90,000)

Ditto (Chatto & Windus, 1926)………..…………........£300-£400 (£2,000-£3,000+)

Woolf, Virginia: MRS DALLOWAY

(Hogarth Press, 1925)…….……………….……….……........£600-£800 (£15,000+)

Woolf, Virginia: TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

(Hogarth Press, 1927)…….……………….……….……........£300-£500 (£10,000+)

Graves, Robert: GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT

            (Jonathan Cape, 1929)………………………….….………£80-£100 (£1,000-£1,250)

Hemingway, Ernest: A FAREWELL TO ARMS

            (Scribners, US, 1929)…………………………...…..……£300-£400 (£2,500-£3,000)

Sassoon, Siegfried: MEMOIRS OF AN INFANTRY OFFICER

            (Faber & Faber, 1930)…………..………………...…..…………£25-£30 (£150-£200)

Waugh, Evelyn: VILE BODIES

            (Chapman & Hall, 1930)…………………………....…..£300-£500 (£6,000-£8,000+)

Orwell, George: DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON

(Gollancz, 1933)…….………………………….......................£200-£300 (£2,500+)

Ditto (Harper, US, 1933)…………………………….....…........£100-£200 (£1,000+)

Isherwood, Christopher: GOODBYE TO BERLIN

            (Hogarth Press, 1939)………………………….............£90-£120 (£1,500-£2,000)

Steinbeck, John: THE GRAPES OF WRATH

(Viking, US, 1939).……..…..…………………….............£75-£100 (£3,000-£4,000)

Ditto (Heineman, 1939).……..………..………….….......……….....£20-£30 (£500+)

Hemingway, Ernest: FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

            (Scribners, US, 1940)……………………………...……...…..£50-£75 (£750-£1,000)

Orwell, George: ANIMAL FARM

(Secker & Warburg, 1945)…….…………………………...............£60-£80 (£1,500)

Ditto (Harcourt Brace, US, 1946)…………….…………...…......£20-£30 (£80-£100)

Part 5: Modern first editions from 1945 to 1980