Author: Alexander Trocchi
Publisher: John Calder, London
Year: 1963, first printing
Originally published by Grove Press, New York 1960
Size: 210 x 135 x 30 mm
Pages: 258, hard cover
Language: English
Condition: Very good. Dust jacket: some wear and discolouring.
Postage & packing not included
Scottish novelist Alexander Trocchi co-founded and edited the English literary magazine Merlin in Paris from 1952 to 1954. Merlin was pivotal in making works by Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre a.o. available in English. After the magazine had folded, Trocchi got addicted to heroin and wrote a string of pornographic books for Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press to sustain himself and feed his addiction. Young Adam, although spiced up with erotic scenes at the request of Girodias, was Trocchi’s first serious novel. The book was published by Olympia Press under the pseudonym Frances Lengel in 1954.
Trocchi’s restless existence took him from Glasgow, where he was born in 1925, first to Paris and from there to California, New Mexico, New York, Montreal, and London. Connected to both the Beats in the US and the Lettrists in France, he formed one of the early links between the Beat Generation and the European avant-garde. In New York, where he worked on a stone scow on the Hudson River to make a living, he wrote his autobiographical second novel Cain’s Book, which was published by Grove Press, New York in 1960. Candid descriptions of the existential bleakness of junky life combined with Trocchi’s refined writing style make the book a classic of post-war literature. Cain’s Book met with acclaim in the US but was banned in the UK after its release by John Calder, London in 1963. The obscenity trial it provoked in Sheffield in 1964 was lost by Calder and following the verdict, the book was not only confiscated by the police but also publicly burned in protest by Trocchi.
Trocchi had moved from Montreal to London in 1962 and stayed there until his death in 1984. He never managed to finish another novel but continued to publish works under the cloak of his Project Sigma, which was related to Situationist International. The best-known of these works is the 1963 manifesto A Revolutionary Proposal: Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds, which – via Simon Vinkenoog – influenced Provo in Amsterdam.
The condition of this rare hardcover copy of John Calder’s notorious 1963 publication is very good, with some discolouring and wear on the dust jacket.