DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Sterling A. Brown's A Negro Looks at the South

John Edgar Tidwell author Mark A Sanders author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc

Published:22nd Feb '07

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Sterling A. Brown's A Negro Looks at the South cover

Using oral history and the printed word, Sterling A. Brown set out during the Second World War to capture the response of African Americans, primarily living in the South, to America's involvement in the war and how it affected them. These responses, brought together in extended, non-fiction essays of many different types, illustrate the diversity of opinions in the Black South about the war and the war period in America. For nearly sixteen years, the excerpts that were never published languished in Brown's manuscript collection at Howard University. Now, for the first time, all of the completed pieces of unpublished writings are combined with the few published sections into the book that Brown envisioned. The legacy Brown left us is not only a superb portrait of the way in which African Americans of the mid-century talked and lived; he also provided a methodology that oral and written historians will find extremely useful. This is clearly a document from another time, as its now outdated title reminds us, but it reveals a world that still informs our sense of ourself as a nation. In fact, it is an unforgettable history, which Brown has cast in a bright, elucidating new light.

Brown's reports bear an austere poetry and rhythm about them. Fueling the reportage is an exacting intellectual mind with a nod to old-fashioned storytelling craft. Subject specialists in the social sciences will consider this a valuable title for inclusion in their folklore and oral history collection. * Jim Hahn, Library Journal *

ISBN: 9780195313994

Dimensions: 157mm x 236mm x 36mm

Weight: 683g

400 pages