“BREAKS NEW GROUND”: FIRST EDITION OF ALAN SILLITOE'S FIRST NOVEL, SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING

SILLITOE, Alan. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. London: W.H. Allen, 1958. Octavo, original red paper boards, original dust jacket. $500.

First edition of Sillitoe’s first and best-known novel that quickly earned him "a place in the history of the English novel" (New Yorker), filmed by director Karel Reisz in a breakthrough movie for the British New Wave movement.

Born into a working-class family, Sillitoe left school at 14 to work in a factory. On publication of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, his award-winning first novel, he was "greeted as the voice of a restless working class" (Guardian). Sillitoe's tale of a factory worker who measures his life in weekends, together with a complex use of interior monologue, third-person narrative and regional vernacular, “breaks new ground," wrote Anthony West, and its author has thereby "assured himself a place in the history of the English novel" (New Yorker).

Book fine; light edge-wear to spine ends of bright near-fine dust jacket.