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Zusatztext “One hundred years after publication! there is in the entire body of social criticism still no more than a handful of meditations on the promise and failings of democracy in America to rival William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s extraordinary collection of fourteen essays.” —from the Introduction by David Levering Lewis Informationen zum Autor W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963), writer, civil rights activist, scholar, and editor, is one of the most significant intellectuals in American history. A founding member of the NAACP, editor for many years of The Crisis and three other journals, and author of seventeen books, his writings, speeches, and public debates brought fundamental changes to American race relations. Arnold Rampersad , the Sarah Hart Kimball Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Stanford University, has also taught at Princeton, Columbia, and Rutgers Universities. His books include The Life of Langston Hughes (two volumes); biographies of W. E. B. Du Bois, Jackie Robinson, and Ralph Ellison; and, with Arthur Ashe, Days of Grace: A Memoir. Among his numerous awards and honors are a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1991 and the National Humanities Medal, presented at the White House in 2011. Klappentext "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." Thus speaks W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls Of Black Folk , one of the most prophetic and influental works in American literature. In this eloquent collection of essays, first published in 1903, Du Bois dares as no one has before to describe the magnitude of American racism and demand an end to it. He draws on his own life for illustration, from his early experiences teaching in the hills of Tennessee to the death of his infant son and his historic break with the conciliatory position of Booker T. Washington. Far ahead of its time, The Souls Of Black Folk both anticipated and inspired much of the black conciousness and activism of the 1960's and is a classic in the literature of civil rights. The elegance of DuBois's prose and the passion of his message are as crucial today as they were upon the book's first publication. Introduction by Arnold Rampersad (Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) Zusammenfassung The Souls of Black Folk is both a groundbreaking work of sociology and an influential cornerstone of African-American literature. From the moment it was published in 1903, this unique and stirring blend of history, essay, fiction, and memoir set the terms of the conversation about race in America and established W. E. B. Du Bois’s enduring reputation as poet, prophet, and scholar. Du Bois famously named “the problem of the color line” that still haunts us today and diagnosed the “double consciousness” of a people forced to live behind a veil. In raising that veil, his book makes an impassioned claim for the power and potential of black culture, the accomplishments of its art, the depths of its spirituality, and its capacity for grandeur in thought and expression. With the lyricism of his prose and the ease with which he moves from the immediacy of journalism and sociology to the permanence of literature, Du Bois transforms a profound historical dilemma into the matter of art. But more importantly, by tracing the tragic past that led to the inequities of the present, he outlined the way forward in the struggle for freedom. It is a testament to his prescience that after more than a century his masterpiece retains its relevance and uncompromising power. ...
