India: A Wounded Civilization.

First American edition of this classic travel narrative by the Nobel Prize-winning author. Octavo, original cloth. Boldly signed by V.S. Naipaul on the title page. From the library of National Book Award-winning author Peter Matthiessen with his bookplate to the front free endpaper. Peter Matthiessen (1927–2014) was an American novelist and nonfiction writer whose work is distinguished by its fusion of literary craft, ethnographic observation, and environmental consciousness. A cofounder of The Paris Review, he produced influential books such as The Snow Leopard (1978), which won the National Book Award, and Shadow Country (2008), which received the National Book Award for Fiction, making him the only writer to win the prize in both nonfiction and fiction categories. Matthiessen was also a committed environmentalist and a Zen Buddhist practitioner, and these commitments shaped his writing’s sustained attention to wilderness, cultural encounter, and spiritual inquiry. Naipaul can be read alongside Peter Matthiessen as a major twentieth-century writer of travel, cultural encounter, and postcolonial critique, though their literary temperaments diverge sharply. While both draw on reportage to examine societies shaped by imperial history, Matthiessen tends toward immersion and spiritual inquiry, whereas Naipaul adopts a skeptical, distanced tone that emphasizes historical rupture and cultural dislocation. Together, their works illuminate contrasting ethical and aesthetic responses to globalization and postcolonial modernity. Very good in a very good dust jacket. Jacket design by Ray Cruz.