Charles Wright THE MESSENGER First edition and 50 similar items

THE MESSENGER by Charles Wright New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, Inc., (1963). First edition, first printing (stated). Mild bumping to the lower corner tips, else near fine; in a very good plus photo-pictorial dust jacket with modest shelf wear, and rubbing to the black front panel. Original price ($3.95) intact on the upper corner of the front flap. The African-American author's first novel with positive reviews on the rear panel from James Baldwin, Lucy Freeman and Kay Boyle. "In The Messenger (1963), Wright draws extensively on his life. Realistically narrated in the first person by Charles Stevenson -- a light-skinned African American newcomer to Manhattan from small-town Missouri -- the novel dramatizes the isolation and alienation of those who fall prey to America's social, economic, and racial caste systems. Stevenson works as an office messenger and constantly finds himself on the edges of power, yet is utterly devoid of any. A man perceived as neither black nor white, ?a minority within a minority,? he drifts through the naturalistic city of New York, where victory and defeat are accepted ?with the same marvelous indifference.?--goodreads. Listed in Ian Young, THE MALE HOMOSEXUAL IN LITERATURE: A Bibliography (second edition) #4236. and Roger Austen's PLAYING THE GAME: The Homosexual Novel in America, page 201-203. PLEASE VIEW OUR STORE FOR MORE GREAT FIRST EDITION BOOKS THANKS!