Prancing Nigger

Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank (1886-1926) was a British novelist. He published his first book, Odette d'Antrevernes, in 1905 before going up to Cambridge. He converted to Catholicism in 1907. In 1909 he left Cambridge, without completing a degree. Living off his inheritance he travelled around Spain, Italy, the Middle East, and North Africa. His novel Valmouth (1918) is based on the activities of various people in a health resort on the West Coast of England. A musical comedy by Sandy Wilson gave the novel some popularity in the 1960s. It has several times been revived and recorded on CD. In The Flower Beneath the Foot (1923), the setting is an imaginary country which may be assumed to be somewhere in the Balkans. Sorrow in Sunlight, retitled at the suggestion of the publisher Prancing Nigger (1925) was especially successful in America. His other works The Princess Zoubaroff (1920), The Flower Beneath the Foot (1923), Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926) and The New Rythum, begun 1926; fragments published posthumously.