WILLIAM GOLDING’S FIRST NOVEL AFTER THE NOBEL PRIZE

William Golding published The Paper Men in 1984, the year after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature. The timing gives the original jacket an unusually direct piece of literary history: above Golding’s name, in large capitals, it announces “WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE.”

By then Golding had spent thirty years living with the consequences of literary fame. Lord of the Flies had made his reputation in 1954, and the Nobel had just placed the ultimate institutional seal upon it. In The Paper Men, he turned his attention to what happens when a writer’s life itself becomes something other people want to possess.

Wilfred Barclay is a successful English novelist whose marriage and drinking are both deteriorating. Into his life comes Rick L. Tucker, an American professor determined to become Barclay’s authorized biographer, editor of his papers and definitive scholarly authority. Barclay wants to escape him. Tucker refuses to disappear. Their pursuit moves across Europe and becomes increasingly obsessive, comic and destructive.

There is something wonderfully vicious in Golding writing this immediately after receiving the Nobel Prize: a newly canonized author producing a novel about the machinery of literary canonization and the people who descend upon a writer’s papers, biography and reputation.

The copy

First American edition, first printing. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984. Octavo, 191 pages. Publisher’s quarter burgundy cloth over paper-covered boards, gilt-lettered spine. Original pictorial dust jacket designed by Honi Werner, retaining the publisher’s $13.95 price on the front flap.

Very good in the original unclipped dust jacket, with toning and light wear visible in the photographs. The jacket is protected in a removable archival cover.

ISBN 0-374-22980-5. The copyright page states “First printing, 1984.”