Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Story of a Ship Wrecked Sailor - UK 1st Edition (1986)

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, Gabriel
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor

London : Jonathan Cape, 1986.First edition in English.

Octavo, original boards in illustrated dust jacket (jacket generally very good for the date, no cuts, tears, or fading; not price-clipped, though a price sticker has evidently been removed); pp. 106; translated from the Spanish by Randolph Hogan. Boards square, binding firm; internally clean and unmarked, with no foxing to text block or edges, pages toned with age as expected.

The first English-language edition of García Márquez's celebrated work of reporting, telling the true story of Luis Alejandro Velasco, who drifted for ten days without food or water after being swept overboard from a Colombian Navy destroyer in the Caribbean in 1955.

The account first appeared as a fourteen-part serial inEl Espectadorin 1955, written by García Márquez as a young staff reporter. Velasco's true version of events, starkly at odds with the government's official account which caused a sensation, embarrassed the Pinilla dictatorship, and contributed to the eventual closure of the newspaper. García Márquez himself was reluctant to have the piece attributed to him for years afterward, and it was not published in book form in Spanish until 1970, once his international fame as the author ofOne Hundred Years of Solitudemade suppression impossible. This Jonathan Cape edition, translated by Randolph Hogan, was the story's first appearance in English.

A very good, clean copy of an important early work by a Nobel laureate author.