A Bend in the River by NAIPAUL, V. S - 1979

Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1979
First edition, first printing
Octavo. Original black cloth, titles to upper board and spine gilt. With the dust jacket
Cloth a trifle marked but a very good copy in the somewhat beaten-up dust jacket. A presentation copy with the author's typically terse presentation inscription to the title page, "V S. Naipaul for Al Murray". Naipaul recalls in A Turn in the South, "I was given the name of a writer who had been educated at Tuskegee, Al Murray. He was, or had been, a protégé of Ralph Ellison's, and he lived in New York…He was a brown man, and older than I had thought…Al had just turned seventy…His sitting room was full of books and records. A moment's looking showed that the books were a serious collection of twentieth-century American writing in first or very early editions."Al Murray, a Tuskegee-educated writer on jazz and one of those interviewed in "A Turn in the South," would later say, "Naipaul is like a satellite in orbit. He's got an objectivity that no one else has, and he knows that the past is an albatross." Proper inscribed, literary association copies of Naipaul's works are distinctly uncommon.
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