London: Jonathan Cape, 1948. First edition of Paton’s classic novel. Octavo, original cloth. Signed and dated by the author on the front free endpaper in the year of publication, "Alan Paton November 2, 1948." Fine in a near fine dust jacket with a small closed tear. Laid into this copy is an original bookmark for the screening of the film, held in Pretoria, South Africa. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. A superior example of an important work, rarely encountered signed. The most famous and important novel in South Africa's history, and an immediate worldwide bestseller when it was published in 1948, Alan Paton's impassioned novel about a black man's country under white man's law is a work of searing beauty. The eminent literary critic Lewis Gannett wrote, "We have had many novels from statesmen and reformers, almost all bad; many novels from poets, almost all thin. In Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country the statesman, the poet and the…