HER FIRST BOOK

GORDIMER, Nadine ~ Face to Face. Short Stories.

FIRST UK PRINTING. Silver Leaf Books, Johannesburg, 1949.

8vo., publisher's blue cloth, lettered and decorated in silver to backstrip; together in the unclipped illustrated dustwrapper (12s 6d to front flap) designed by Ernest Ullmann; THE BOOK very good, a little rubbed with some fading to the colour at edges of boards; endpapers lightly offset, with previous owner's names in ink to the ffep and front paste down, as well as an ink stamp in purple ink; lightly toned interally, with a few marks to the edges of the text block; THE WRAPPER very good, completely unrestored, with marginal toning and browning, chipping, creasing and tears to edges, rear flap almost completely split from lower panel (but holding), some loss to spine tips and edges of folds; and one long tear to the upper panel; scarce to find at all in the wrapper. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. FIRST UK EDITION. The Nobel laureate's and Booker Prize Winner's first book, in the dustwrapper. The South African writer and political activist Nadine Gordimer was born into a Jewish family in a town just outside of Johannesburg in 1923. Her mother, who was actively concerned about the poverty and discrimination faced by black people in South Africa (and which led her to found a crèche for black children), was an activist, and Gormier furthermore witnessed racial and economic inequality in South Africa as a teenager, when police raided her family home, confiscating letters and diaries from a servant's room. She began writing from a young age, and this, her first short story collection, was released a year after the introduction of apartheid in South Africa, a system to which she was violently opposed, and spent many of the following years campaigning against. Best remembered today for the works which highlighted moral and racial issues, she was an adviser to Nelson Mandela, and became active in HIV/AIDS causes. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Very Good
JACKET: Very Good