MYRDAL, Gunnar.

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An American Dilemma. Inscribed by the author to a British economist and international civil servant: "To Harold E. Caustin with kind regards Gunnar Myrdal, Lake Success [?], 22 August 1972".Harold Edwin Caustin (1907-82) served as director of the Oxford Institute of Statistics before entering the Civil Service in 1940. During the war he served as personal assistant to Sir Frederick Leith-Ross and secretary of the Inter-Allied Committee on Post-War Requirements. After holding senior posts with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration from 1944 to 1947, he joined the UN Secretariat and later served as UN resident representative in Libya and Nigeria. The place name in the inscription appears to be Lake Success, the UN's provisional headquarters from 1946 to 1951; Myrdal also worked then in the UN Secretariat. Commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, An American Dilemma drew on economics, sociology, anthropology, political science, and law to examine the conflict between American egalitarian ideals and persistent discrimination against Black Americans. Myrdal's best-known and most influential work, it was cited by the US Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which held state-imposed segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Myrdal shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Friedrich Hayek.This is a later printing of the first edition, without the "first edition" notice on the copyright page.

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