The Ginger Man was published by the Olympia Press in Paris in 1955, after being rejected by every reputable publisher in London and New York. It was initially published as part of the Traveller’s Companion series — Olympia’s pornography list — which infuriated Donleavy and began a decades-long legal battle with publisher Maurice Girodias. The novel was banned in Ireland and the United States, prosecuted for obscenity in several jurisdictions, and eventually recognized as one of the masterpieces of postwar fiction.
Sebastian Dangerfield is an American veteran studying law at Trinity College Dublin on the GI Bill, though he rarely attends classes and has no intention of becoming a lawyer. He is married to a long-suffering English woman named Marion, with whom he has a child, and his days are devoted to drinking, fornication, brawling, and the avoidance of creditors. He is charming, violent, self-pitying, and absolutely without moral compass — a monster of appetite who is also, somehow, irresistibly likeable.
The novel’s style is its greatest innovation: Donleavy shifts between first and third person, between past and present tense, between lyrical interior monologue and raw physical comedy, creating a prose that captures the rhythm of consciousness — and particularly of drunken consciousness — with an accuracy that no other writer has matched. The language is simultaneously crude and beautiful, violent and tender, and its influence can be traced through fifty years of comic fiction from John Kennedy Toole to Martin Amis.
Dublin in the early 1950s — poor, Catholic, repressive, and alive with literary energy — is the novel’s essential setting. Donleavy’s Dublin is a city of pubs, pawn shops, damp bedsits, and an extraordinary concentration of wit and desperation. The postwar generation of Americans and British who studied at Trinity form a foreign colony within this world, taking advantage of cheap drink and cheap rent while the Irish around them struggle with poverty and the suffocating moralism of the Church.
Collecting The Ginger Man
First edition (Olympia Press, Paris, 1955): Green paper wrappers, Traveller’s Companion Series No. 7. Extremely collectible.
Market values:
- Olympia Press first edition (wrappers, good condition): $2,000–$8,000
- First UK complete edition (Neville Spearman, 1956): $300–$800
- First US complete edition (Delacorte, 1965): $50–$150
- First US expurgated edition (McDowell Obolensky, 1958): $40–$100