Souls of Black Folk (Modern Library) (Modern Library (Hardcover)): Centennial Edition (Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction Books) - Hardcover

David Levering Lewis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375509119 ISBN 13: 9780375509117

Publisher: Random House Inc, 2003

Synopsis

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time

When first published in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk struck like a thunderclap, quickly establishing itself as a work that wholly redefined the history of the black experience in America, introducing the now famous "problem of the color line." In decades since, its stature has only grown, and today it ranks as one of the most influential and resonant works in the history of American thought.

This centennial edition contains a landmark Introduction by historian David Levering Lewis that brilliantly demonstrates how The Souls of Black Folk remains indispensable not only to an understanding of the history of race and democracy in America but to considerations of the future of racial and cultural comity in the twenty-first century.

About this title

Review:

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868--1963) is the greatest of African-American intellectuals--a sociologist, historian, novelist, and activist whose astounding career spanned the nation's history from Reconstruction to the civil rights movement. Born in Massachusetts and educated at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, Du Bois penned his epochal masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903. It remains his most studied and popular work; its insights into Negro life at the turn of the 20th century still ring true.

With a dash of the Victorian and Enlightenment influences that peppered his impassioned yet formal prose, the book's largely autobiographical chapters take the reader through the momentous and moody maze of Afro-American life after the Emancipation Proclamation--from poverty, the neoslavery of the sharecropper, illiteracy, miseducation and lynching, to the heights of humanity reached by the spiritual "sorrow songs" that birthed gospel and the blues. The most memorable passages are contained in "On Booker T Washington and Others", where Du Bois criticises his famous contemporary's rejection of higher education and accommodationist stance toward white racism: "Mr. Washington's programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races", he writes, further complaining that Washington's thinking "withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens". The capstone of The Souls of Black Folk, though, is Du Bois' haunting, eloquent description of the concept of the black psyche's "double consciousness", which he described as "a peculiar sensation....One ever feels this twoness--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder". Thanks to WEB Du Bois' commitment and foresight--and the intellectual excellence expressed in this timeless literary gem--black Americans can today look in the mirror and rejoice in their beautiful black, brown and beige reflections. --Eugene Holley Jr

Review:

" 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

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0375509119
• ISBN 13: 9780375509117
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320