GOLDING, William (1911–1993). The Paper Men. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984.
FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING, published the year after Golding received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the original dust jacket illustrated by Paul Hogarth and designed by Pentagram.
The Paper Men turns one of the stranger relationships in literary life into fiction: the relationship between a writer and the person determined to possess his papers, explain his work, and eventually write his life.
Wilfred Barclay is an established English novelist with fame, money, a failing marriage and a drinking problem. Rick L. Tucker is the young American academic who has decided that Barclay will become the subject of his great scholarly project. He wants access to the manuscripts and correspondence. He wants to become Barclay’s authorized biographer. Barclay wants nothing to do with him.
What follows is an increasingly obsessive struggle between writer and scholar, and a wonderfully caustic examination of what happens when a living author begins to become an archive. Private correspondence becomes evidence, manuscripts become scholarly property, and somebody else begins preparing the authoritative version of a life that is not yet over.
The subject was particularly pointed when the novel appeared. Golding had received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983, thirty years after Lord of the Flies began his literary career. He had himself become exactly the kind of canonical writer whose manuscripts, biography and reputation would attract the attention of scholars and institutions. A specialist description of the first edition notes Golding’s own discomfort with becoming, in his words, the “raw material of an academic light industry.”
The British first edition appeared in February 1984. The original jacket, with its striking crowned figure by Paul Hogarth, makes Golding’s new status explicit, prominently identifying him as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
191 pages. Publisher’s original black boards, spine lettered in silver; original pictorial dust jacket after Paul Hogarth, designed by Pentagram. ISBN 0-571-13206-5.
Condition: A very good copy in the original dust jacket. Binding sound and pages clean and well preserved. Jacket with light signs of age and handling and minor wear at the edges and extremities, protected in a removable clear archival sleeve. Please see photographs for condition.
