Out of the Pit
London: Faber and Faber, 1951. First Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good / Good. Item #2314230
First edition. Two inch chip and half inch chip to jacket spine, sticker on rear jacket panel, a few minor chips to jacket edges.
286 pp. A novel of "British proletarian realism" about a British miner and a worker's strike. "'Pit ruins you for any other job unless you're real bright or just bloody stupid.' Dave Stand is neither real bright nor bloody stupid. He is a young miner, sensitive beyond the ordinary, who like many others looks for personal meaning in his work, and fails bitterly to find it. Dave gets a part in a documentary film to be made at the Pit where he works; his life is at once intensified and complicated. He sees on the one hand the alien "liberating" world of the film men; on the other, Tandy Collins and his fellow workers in a nationalized mine. He is forced to choose between them; and his choice is made no easier by his relationship with Phyllida Markahm, for whose loveliness the town is a prison in which she stays to look after an invalid and disillusioned father. Dave's love-story, at once idyllic and realistic, is the main thread of a novel presenting the problems of a tough, kindly, humorous people at a time when a strike forces crisis: a very sympathetic and convincing study of the warmth and bitterness that unite a mining community against the world outside."
Price: $500.00