Visible Man: The Life of Henry Dumas

Leak, Jeffrey B.

ISBN 10: 0820328707 / ISBN 13: 9780820328706

Published by University of Georgia Press, 2014

About this Item

Former library book with small stamp on title page and stickers on back pastedown and free endpaper. Dust jacket has stickers on the spine and back cover and is encased in a clear protective cover. Would otherwise be Near Fine. Fore edge of text block has four small stains near the bottom. Boards and spine are straight. Binding is tight. Pages are clean and unmarked. Image shown is of actual item. Free shipping within the US.

Seller Inventory # ABE-1714780377763

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Visible Man: The Life of Henry Dumas
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0820328707
• ISBN 13: 9780820328706
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

Henry Dumas (1934–1968) was a writer who did not live to see most of his fiction and poetry in print. A son of Sweet Home, Arkansas, and Harlem, he devoted himself to the creation of a black literary cosmos, one in which black literature and culture were windows into the human condition. While he certainly should be understood in the context of the cultural and political movements of the 1960s―Black Arts, Black Power, and Civil Rights―his writing, and ultimately his life, were filled with ambiguities and contradictions.

Dumas was shot and killed in 1968 in Harlem months before his thirty-fourth birthday by a white transit policeman under circumstances never fully explained. After his death he became a kind of literary legend, but one whose full story was unknown. A devoted cadre of friends and later admirers from the 1970s to the present pushed for the publication of his work. Toni Morrison championed him as “an absolute genius.” Amiri Baraka, a writer not quick to praise others, claimed that Dumas produced “actual art, real, man, and stunning.” Eugene Redmond and Quincy Troupe heralded Dumas’s poetry, short stories, and work as an editor of “little” magazines.

With Visible Man, Jeffrey B. Leak offers a full examination of both Dumas’s life and his creative development. Given unprecedented access to the Dumas archival materials and numerous interviews with family, friends, and writers who knew him in various contexts, Leak opens the door to Dumas’s rich and at times frustrating life, giving us a layered portrait of an African American writer and his coming of age during one of the most volatile and transformative decades in American history.

About the Author

JEFFREY B. LEAK is an associate professor of English and director of the Center for the Study of the New South at the University of North Carolina–Charlotte. He is the editor of Rac(e)ing to the Right: Selected Essays of George S. Schuyler and the author of Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature.