The Go-Between was first published in Britain by Hamish Hamilton in 1953. In the U.S., its publisher was Alfred A. Knopf in the summer of 1954, and the book was slow to sell at first. However, it was greeted with favourable reviews. The New York Times called it "a triumph of literary architecture",[1] while two articles were devoted to it in the Los Angeles Times. Joseph Henry Jackson commented on its skilful presentation as "a many-leveled affair; perhaps only the author knows how much there is in it of symbol and reference."[2] A month later Milton Merlin described it as "a superbly composed and an irresistibly haunting novel" characterised by "the author's beautiful and ingenious style, his whimsy, irony and humor, and, most of all, the powerful wallop of a deceptively simple, almost gentle story of a boy lost in a strange world of emotions."[3]
There have been regular editions from Penguin Books and other sources since 1958. By 1954, translations were being prepared in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Japanese, French and Italian. Others followed later in Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Romanian and German. The novel has also been set as an exam text with a study guide dedicated to it[4] and there have been interdisciplinary studies on psychological[5] and philosophical themes there.[6]
