THE OVERCROWDED BARRACOON AND OTHER ARTICLES

New York, NY: Borzoi/Alfred A Knoff, 1972. First American Edition, First Printing . Hardcover. COLLECTIBLE - NEAR FINE/Near Fine. Text/As New & Bright. Gilt embossed orange linen boards. DJ/NF; w/scratches to lower back & creasings to inner flaps. PO stamp to lower text edge. A collection of narratives, some previously published, from novelist & historian V. S. Naipaul (1932 - 2018), a Trinidad British writer who wrote more 30 books. Known for his novel "Mr. Biwas" (1961), Naipaul was awarded the Trinity Cross, Trinidad & Tobago's highest nat'l honour in 1989, knighthood in Britain in 1990, and, the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. His grandparents left India to work in Trinidad's plantations as indentured servants and his father became a journalist. 286 pgs. Anthology of essays, linked thematically, of self-exiled people & the perplexities of displacement. The essays in four groups. I, An Unlikely Colonial; II, India; III, Looking Westward; and IV, Columbus and Crusoe. The final essay --- from which the title is derived --- is of Maurtius. A "barracoon" is an enclosure or barracks for temporary confinement of slaves & convicts. A deep, sensitive & powerful volume of trails of economic migration.