Faith and the Good Thing

New York: The Viking Press, 1974. First Edition, First Printing. Hardcover. Very good +/fine. A Very Good + copy of the first edition, first printing (spine mildly askew, some foxing to the closed page block's edges, tiny defect to the upper leading corner of the leaf hosing pages 39 and 40) in a Fine dust jacket; the author's Debut work of fiction and his second book to be published (the first being a philosophical work published 1988 under the title "Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970"). Writing of this Debut Novel in the New York Times, Anne Gotlieb stated "This is a strange and often wonderful hybrid -- an ebullient philosophical novel in the form of a folktale-cum-black girl's odyssey. It is a book bubbling like a conjure woman's kettle with African lore, preserved intact in the half-magical, half-demeaning world of Hatten County, Georgia." "Faith and the Good Thing" followed what Johnson calls his apprentice novels -- six novels that he had written by age 26 for which he could find no publisher willing to accept and publish any of them. Of his experience in failure, Johnson stated "I never listen to negativity. As a black artist in white America, Ive had to not listen to all sorts of peoplewhites and blackswho tried to discourage me or couldnt understand what I was doing and why. But Ive always believed in myself and trusted my God-given talents. I believe James Baldwin addressed all these matters well in his essay The New Lost Generation, published in the July 1961 issue of Esquire. There, Baldwin said, A man is not a man until hes able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from that of others. A nice copy of Johnson's first fictional novel to be published.