I Spit on Your Graves

I Spit on Your Graves

First edition
Author	Vernon Sullivan (Boris Vian)
Original title	J'irai cracher sur vos tombes
Translator	Boris Vian Milton Rosenthal
Language	French
Publisher	Éditions du Scorpion
Publication date	1946
Publication place	France
Published in English	1948
Pages	190

I Spit on Your Graves (French: J'irai cracher sur vos tombes) is a 1946 roman noir by French writer Boris Vian, initially published by Éditions du Scorpion under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan. The story is set in the United States and it follows Lee Anderson, a black man whose white complexion allows him to cross racial barriers, and who swears revenge against the citizens of a small Southern town, in repayment for the death of his brother, who was lynched by an all white mob.

Having experienced rejection with his earlier publication attempts, Vian marketed I Spit on Your Graves as a "translation" of an original work by a certain Vernon Sullivan, allegedly an African-American writer of hardboiled fiction —a genre very popular at the time. Following the example Franz Kafka had set with his unfinished novel Amerika (1927), Vian, who had never set foot in the United States, but was a great fan of its popular culture and especially its jazz music, created an imaginary Southern American small town setting for his novel, based on descriptions he found in contemporary novels by authors such as Nelson Algren, Richard Wright and Raymond Chandler.^[1]

Due to the novel's shocking subject matter (with many disturbing scenes of rape and murder), Vian claimed that its author was forced out of his native country, and he was now living as an expatriate in France, to escape censorship and racial violence. This elaborate literary hoax that Vian had concocted was only exposed long after I Spit on Your Graves had gained notoriety and financial success, becoming the most talked about book of 1947.