The first American edition, issued by the John Day Company of New York in 1967 from offices on West 45th Street. The copyright line still reads 1964, the year of the London first — the novel had to wait three years to cross the Atlantic. The Library also holds the revised Heinemann paperback as number sixteen in the African Writers Series.
The jacket summarises the novel for a readership assumed to know nothing of it: Ezeulu, Chief Priest of Ulu, whose authority is strengthened when Captain Winterbottom halts a war he had tried to prevent, and who then sends a son to learn Christianity in order to know the secret of the white man’s strength — a decision that brings the conflict of old and new to its height when the boy tries to kill a royal python.
The back flap advertises A Man of the People at $3.95, noting that its publication coincided with a revolution in Nigeria resembling the events it narrates. The review leaf records that Arrow of God was the first novel to win the Jock Campbell–New Statesman Award for African writing, and gathers notices from the New Statesman, the Sunday Times, the Times Literary Supplement, The Times and The Observer.
Dedicated to the memory of the author’s father, Isaiah Okafor Achebe.
American edition. This is the first American edition, 1967, not the 1964 London first. The Library also holds the revised Heinemann text as African Writers Series no. 16 — a third state of the same novel, since Achebe reworked it for that edition.
