William Golding’s second novel turns the history of humanity upside down.
GOLDING, William (1911–1993). The Inheritors. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1962.
FIRST AMERICAN EDITION, expressly so stated on the copyright page. In the original Alfred Zalon-designed dust jacket, retaining the publisher’s $4.50 price.
Seven years after Lord of the Flies, American readers encountered Golding’s extraordinary second novel: a story about the disappearance of the Neanderthals told largely from the side of those who disappear.
A small group of Neanderthals encounters another kind of human being. The newcomers are ingenious, technologically capable and frighteningly difficult for the Neanderthals to understand. Gradually, Golding allows us to recognize them for what they are: Homo sapiens.
The reversal is the heart of the book. Human evolution, usually narrated as ascent and progress, is experienced here by the people it destroys. Golding’s Neanderthals are communal and largely innocent of deliberate violence; the supposedly more advanced newcomers bring imagination and invention, but also calculation, fear and cruelty.
Golding announces the argument before the novel even begins. His epigraph comes from H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History, with its old characterization of Neanderthals as ugly, brutish and possibly cannibalistic. The Inheritors proceeds to dismantle that image, leaving the reader to wonder which species deserves to be called primitive.
It was the novel Golding wrote immediately after Lord of the Flies, and one he regarded particularly highly. In 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Original black cloth in the original pictorial dust jacket designed by Alfred Zalon, with the original $4.50 price intact on the front flap. Rear jacket panel with a portrait of Golding by Lewis O. Thompson.
Condition: Very good. Binding sound and contents clean overall. Dust jacket with rubbing, surface and edge wear, creasing, and small chips and short tears at the extremities; substantially complete and protected in a removable archival sleeve. Contemporary gift inscription on the front free endpaper, dated Christmas 1975.
