In 1952 the United Society for Christian Literature in London received for publication a manuscript from Lagos, Nigeria, whose author was Amos Tutuola, a messenger in a government office. It was not the kind of material they usually handled; still, they were willing to pass it on. Soon afterward Faber and Faber brought out "The Palm-Wine Drinkard" to considerable critical acclaim…. The work received no such welcome from West African readers. Babasola Johnson, in the weekly West Africa, went so far as to say that it "should not have been published at all."

[Like his first, Mr. Tutuola's second book, "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,"] uses elements and tales of traditional Yoruba folklore; a seven-year-old boy escapes from his village during a slave raid and wanders through the off-limits forest of the Ghosts for twenty-four hair-raising years. His adventures include transformations into a cow that cannot eat...