The Palm-Wine Drinkard
Amos Tutuola
A man who drinks palm wine all day loses his tapster to a fall from a tree and walks into the land of the dead to fetch him back, meeting on the way a Complete Gentleman assembled out of rented body parts. Faber published it in 1952 under the full title The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town, and Tutuola's unschooled English is the point of the book rather than a flaw in it.
Why you should read this
Best known as the first African novel published in English to reach an international audience, built from Yoruba oral storytelling rather than European novelistic form. Its English is deliberately unstandardized, which unsettled critics on first publication and still shapes how the book gets taught today.
- Field
- Literature
- Form
- Fiction
- Published
- 1952
- Themes
- African LiteratureLiterature
