Lawd Today
Price: $200.00
Hard Cover. New York: Walker and Company, 1963. First Edition. About Fine / Dust Jacket Included.
First edition, first printing. Publisher's orange cloth, lettered in gold and red to front board and spine, deckled fore edge; in the original dust jacket designed by the Etheridges, with a man's dark shadow against a green building, lettered in yellow and white. About fine book, with some offsetting to front and rear endpapers, spine slightly bumped; very good unclipped dust jacket, with some wear to edges and slight toning to spine, creasing and a half-inch closed tear to rear panel, and bookseller's price sticker to front flap. Lawd Today follows a day in the life of Jake Jackson, a black postal clerk in Chicago during the Great Depression. Songs, wordplay, newspaper bulletins, and other imaginative forms comprise this kaleidoscopic story, which is divided into three parts: "Commonplace," "Squirrel Cage," and "Rats' Alley." Jake is haunted by the post-emancipation racism that he and many black Americans of the time faced, yet the ghosts that haunt him lead him to violence-his day is marked with instances of abuse towards his wife, Lil. Domestic strife, poverty, and prejudice mark Jake's experience. As the dust jacket states, "Jake is not an admirable man, not even a pleasant one, but before his nightmarish odyssey is done, the reader sees all too clearly that society has given Jake Jackson, like Bigger Thomas, no alternative."Lawd Today is the first novel Wright ever wrote, yet it wasn't published until 1963, three years after his death. Item #RW007
