Three Novels: The Mystic Masseur; The Suffrage of Elvira; Miguel Street.

a presentation copy to American jazz critic Albert Murray
A very nice copy in the dust jacket of the omnibus edition of Naipaul's first three novels, which unlike his later, darker works are an amusing and comic portrayal of life in the Caribbean.

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...His sitting room was full of books and records...the books were a serious collection of twentieth-century American writing in first or very early editions.' Al Murray 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.' Inscribed, literary association copies of Naipaul's works are distinctly uncommon.