The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)

A$80 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books · No longer available

Signed

SILLITOE, Alan. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2002. Octavo. Full dark green leather. Spine with five raised bands, gilt-decorated. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 176 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on tipped-in page. Accompanied by signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate (pasted to front endpaper). Alan Sillitoe (1928–2010) grew up in Nottingham in conditions of genuine poverty — his father was illiterate, the family frequently without food or heat — and left school at fourteen to work in a bicycle factory. His first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), drew directly on that experience and announced one of the most distinctive voices in postwar British fiction. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, published the following year and winner of the Hawthornden Prize in 1960, consolidated the reputation and gave the literature of the period one of its defining images. The collection contains nine stories, all set in or around Nottingham, all concerned with working-class men and boys who find themselves at odds with the systems — legal, institutional, economic — that govern their lives. The title story is its centrepiece: a boy in a Borstal reform school who discovers he has a talent for long-distance running, and who is given the opportunity to win a cross-country race against a public school and thereby bring credit to the instituti

• Binding: Hardcover

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