Sinister Street was first published in two volumes, the first in 1913, the second in the following year. Henry James, in a letter to Hugh Walpole, described it as “really a very interesting and remarkable performance… at one and the same time so extremely young… and so confoundingly mature.” In an article, he named Compton Mackenzie as one of the four young novelists most likely to sustain the greatest traditions of English fiction. Year by year the novel has sold steadily and established itself as one of the classics of its age. It is the story of a young man who passed through a public school and Oxford in the first decade of this century and whose experiences culminated in the byways of London, and it has been justly described by Mr. Frank Swinnerton as “the record of a departed generation”. But, while manners and conditions have changed, its appeal retains the same force for every succeeding generation, because the story is concerned with the perpetual problems of romantic youth.