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The Negro Caravan.
New York: The Dryden Press, 1941. 8vo (8.25” x 5.75”), blue cloth, gilt spine and title. xvii, 1082 pp. Ownership inscription in ink at front paste-down: “From the Library of T. Earl Pardoe.” CONDITION: Very good, front cover lightly scratched in two places, minimal wear. First edition of this “one-thousand-eighty-two-page anthology [that] not only defined the field of African American literature as a legitimate academic discipline for the first time but, by soberly assessing black authors ‘without sentimental allowances’ on an equal rather than separate basis, ‘ser[ved] notice that the Negro author has come of age” (Weinstein). Collects African American writers working across short stories, novels, poetry, folk literature, drama, speeches, biography, and essays, including works by Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Chester Himes, Charles W. Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Phillis Wheatley, W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Katherine Dunham, and many others. The breadth of selection not only represents the range of Black writing, but allows readers to “appreciate the evolution of black writing in style, subject matter and theme in each genre, not to mention having the sheer pleasure of reading works of which one had only heard or had never known existed” (Lester). Most importantly, this anthology presents a counternarrative to the dominant mode of Black representation—characterization by White persons and authors who “believed that “they knew blacks better than blacks knew themselves.” As the editors state in their introduction, this anthology claimed for African Americans “the responsibility of being the ultimate portrayers of their own.” REFERENCES: Blockson 5948; Weinstein 249; Lester, Julius. “Journey Through Black Literature: The Negro Caravan,” The New York Times, November 30, 1969.
Item #10479
Price: $450.00
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