Hollywood actor Johnny Depp has penned the foreword for the new edition of the classic Irish novel The Ginger Man which this year celebrates its sixtieth anniversary.
Over 40 million copies of novel by JP Donleavy have been sold since its first publication in 1955. The story follows the social and sexual adventures of a footloose American student on the streets and the pubs of Dublin in the early 1950s.
Brendan Behan predicted that JP Donleavy’s classic novel was destined to “go around the world, and beat the bejaysus out of the Bible”. It is believed that the light-hearted, picaresque tale has brought more American tourists to Dublin’s Trinity College - where much of it was set - than the Book of Kells.
Dorothy Parker considered The Ginger Man to be “stunning... brilliant... The Ginger Man is the picaresque novel to stop them all. Lusty, violent, wildly funny, it is a rigadoon of rascality, a bawled-out comic song of sex,” she enthused.
89-year old JP Donleavy whose best-known novel, The Ginger Man has just been reissued.
As well as the original text, the new edition has a foreword by Johnny Depp, along with a selection of archival photographs from Dublin and TCD in the early 1950s.
The novel has enjoyed multiple foreign translations, into Korean, Chinese, Finnish and many more languages. Banned in Ireland until 1968, The Ginger Man has been cited as one of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century.
