"I WAS NOT BORN WITH A HUNGER TO BE FREE. I WAS BORN FREE": LONG WALK TO FREEDOM, SIGNED BY NELSON MANDELA

MANDELA, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom. Boston: Little, Brown, (1994). Thick octavo, original half black cloth, cartographic endpapers, original dust jacket. $5500.

First American edition, first printing, of the stirring autobiography of the esteemed Nobel Peace Prize winner and South Africa's first black president, signed on the title page by Nelson Mandela.

"The Nelson Mandela who emerges from his memoir… is considerably more human than the icon of legend… Mandela is, on the evidence of his amazing life, neither a messiah nor a moralist nor really a revolutionary but a pragmatist to the core, a shrewd balancer of honor and interests. He is, to use a word unhappily fallen into disrepute, a politician, though one distinguished from lesser practitioners of his calling mainly by his unwavering faith in his ultimate objective, ending white minority rule" (New York Times). This edition was issued simultaneously in England and the United States and in the same year as a South African edition. Illustrated with 24 pages of black-and-white photographs.

Book near-fine with small closed tear to endpaper and soiling to rear joint, dust jacket fine. A handsome signed copy.