A Touch of Innocence: A Memoir of Childhood. This item is unavailable.A Touch of Innocence: A Memoir of Childhood

An internationally known dancer, choreographer, and gifted anthropologist, Katherine Dunham was born to a black American tailor and a well-to-do French Canadian woman twenty years his senior. This book is Dunham's story of the chaos and conflict that entered her childhood after her mother's early death. In stark prose, she tells of growing up in both black and white households and of the divisions of race and class in Chicago that become the harsh realities of her young life. A riveting narrative of one girl's struggle to transcend the painful confusions of a family and culture in turmoil, Dunham's story is full of the clarity, candor, and intelligence that lifted her above her troubled beginnings.

Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) was a dancer, choreographer, educator, and cultural ambassador. Dunham had a very successful and influential dance career and directed her own dance company for many years. Dunham studied ballet while an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and purused academic work in anthropology, doing fieldwork in the Caribbean focused on local dance forms. Although she submitted a masters thesis based on that work, she soon left academic study to pursue a career in dance. Her early years were the basis for A Touch of Innocence: Memoirs of Childhood, published in 1959. A continuation based on her experiences in Haiti, Island Possessed, was published in 1969.