Cry, the Beloved Country.

PATON, Alan.

$2,000.00

Item Number: 43091

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948.

First American edition of Paton’s classic novel. Octavo, original cloth. Signed and dated by the author in the year of publication on the front free endpaper, “Alan Paton Johannesburg May 27, 1948.” Near fine in a very good dust jacket with light rubbing and wear. Rare and desirable signed in the year of publication.

The most famous and important novel in South Africa's history, and an immediate worldwide bestseller when it was published in 1948, Alan Paton's impassioned novel about a black man's country under white man's law is a work of searing beauty. The eminent literary critic Lewis Gannett wrote, "We have had many novels from statesmen and reformers, almost all bad; many novels from poets, almost all thin. In Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country the statesman, the poet and the novelist meet in a unique harmony." "The greatest novel to emerge out of the tragedy of South Africa, and one of the best novels of our time" (The New Republic). Two cinema adaptations of the book have been made, the first in 1951, which was directed by Zoltán Korda, starring Canada Lee, Sidney Poitier, and Charles Carson. The second in 1995, starring James Earl Jones and Richard Harris. The novel was also adapted as a musical called Lost in the Stars (1949), with a book by the American writer Maxwell Anderson and music composed by the German emigre Kurt Weill.