GOLDING, William. Rites of Passage. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980. First American edition, first printing.

A ship leaves England for Australia in the early nineteenth century carrying a miniature version of the society it has left behind: sailors and soldiers, emigrants and gentlemen, an imperious captain, an unfortunate clergyman and Edmund Talbot, a young Englishman convinced of his ability to understand them all.

Talbot records the voyage in a journal intended for his influential godfather. He is intelligent, observant, privileged and often very funny. He is also considerably less perceptive than he believes.

At the center of his account is the Reverend James Colley, an awkward clergyman whose attempts to find his place aboard ship end in humiliation and catastrophe. As Talbot gradually discovers what has happened, the journal he began as an amused record of other people's peculiarities becomes something much darker.

The enclosed ship gives Golding an ideal laboratory. Class, religion, sex and authority cannot escape one another at sea, and the civilized hierarchy carried aboard from England proves considerably more fragile than its passengers imagine.

Rites of Passage won the 1980 Booker Prize and became the first volume of Golding’s To the Ends of the Earth trilogy, followed by Close Quarters and Fire Down Below. Golding received the Nobel Prize in Literature three years later, in 1983.

First American edition, first printing, explicitly stated “First printing, 1980” on the copyright page. 278 pages. Publisher’s boards backed in black cloth, in the original dust jacket designed by Cynthia Krupat. 

A very well-preserved copy. Binding firm and interior clean and bright. Original dust jacket with only light shelf and edge wear. Please see photographs for full condition.