Savrola

     Savrola is Winston S. Churchill’s first major literary effort and his only full-length work of fiction. The novel was first published in 1900, and its subtitle, A Tale of the Revolution in Laurania, demonstrates the author’s focus on significant change in political regimes. Savrola contains the seeds of Churchill’s exceptional talents as a statesman, a political philosopher, and a man of literature. The ambition of the book’s eponymous protagonist Savrola to rule foreshadows Churchill’s own career as the greatest democratic leader of the twentieth century. He sketches a model of the education needed for modern statesmanship and describes the kind of rhetoric that appeals to a modern democratic people, all in a style that anticipates his writing in the books for which he later won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
     This edition of Savrola contains extensive introductory materials, notes, and an appendix. It is lavishly illustrated with reproductions of the André Collot woodcuts made for a limited French-language edition.