My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

New York: Grove Press,, 1954. First US edition, first printing, of the author's scarce second book, following The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), which T. S. Eliot at Faber recommended for publication, gaining Tutuola international recognition. "Among the earliest Nigerian fictional writers in English", Tutuola "re-envisioned classic themes of African, particularly West African, storytelling... in a written [Pidgin] English that remains uniquely his" (Nyamnjoh, p. xi). Tutuola's writings "retell many of the stories he first heard as a child in Abeokuta, a Yoruba-speaking town in western Nigeria where he was born in 1920" (Niven). In this novel he "uniquely synthesizes the Yoruba culture he was born into with that of the British and Christian colonialism under which he matured into adulthood. [It] tells the story of a west African child who is forced for 24 years to navigate an incomprehensible wilderness filled with fantastical beings, most of whom are, as the title suggests, some form of ghost. It's a striking work of syncretism, recontextualizing previously unrecorded west African mythology by imbuing it with symbols of what was at the time a new global modernity... Tutuola would go on to inspire Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and superproducer Brian Eno to record a 1981 album by the same title as this book; it's a testament to his impact, as arguably the first international artist to form a new language by sampling the folk traditions of the global south and the modern imagery of the industrialized West" (Wolfson). It was first published in the UK earlier that year. Loosely inserted in this copy is the publisher's mailing list card. Octavo. Original red cloth, spine lettered in red on silver ground and in silver, bottom edge untrimmed. With dust jacket. Bookseller's ticket to rear pastedown. Browning to endpapers, else a fine, fresh copy in near-fine dust jacket, unclipped, one or two nicks, a little rubbing to edges, remains sharp. Bleiler, p. 499; not in Currey or Locke. Alastair Niven, "Obituary: Amos Tutuola", Independent, 15 June 1997; Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd: How Amos Tutola Can Change Our Minds, 2017; Elijah Wolfson, "The 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time", Time, 2020.