Written in 1951 by Arna Bontemps, major literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance and close friend of Langston Hughes, Chariot in the Sky tells the story of the Jubilee Singers through the life of a young slave boy, Caleb, who becomes one of their earliest members. Caleb is a teenage slave sent to Charleston, South Carolina, to apprentice a tailor. Through careful listening and observation, Caleb diligently teaches himself to read and write. He also discovers his musical talents and develops into an accomplished singer. When the Civil War begins, Caleb is sold to a shopkeeper who takes...
Written in 1951 by Arna Bontemps, major literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance and close friend of Langston Hughes, Chariot in the Sky tells the st...
W. C. Handy's blues--"Memphis Blues," "Beale Street Blues," "St. Louis Blues"--changed America's music forever. In Father of the Blues, Handy presents his own story: a vivid picture of American life now vanished. W. C. Handy (1873-1958) was a sensitive child who loved nature and music; but not until he had won a reputation did his father, a preacher of stern Calvinist faith, forgive him for following the "devilish" calling of black music and theater. Here Handy tells of this and other struggles: the lot of a black musician with entertainment groups in the turn-of-the-century South;...
W. C. Handy's blues--"Memphis Blues," "Beale Street Blues," "St. Louis Blues"--changed America's music forever. In Father of the Blues, Handy ...
Arna Wendell Bontemps Arna Bontemps Arnold Rampersad
'Gabriel Prosser's 1800 slave revolt allowed Bontemps to warn of the rebellion that would come of poverty and racial oppression. This metaphor of revolution is at the same time a highly pertinent representation of black masculinity that will reward students of gender, slavery and the sensibilities of the 1930s.' -Nell Irvin Painter
'Gabriel Prosser's 1800 slave revolt allowed Bontemps to warn of the rebellion that would come of poverty and racial oppression. This metaphor of revo...
James Weldon Johnson Arna Bontemps Arna Wendell Bontemps
James Weldon Johnson's emotionally gripping novel is a landmark in black literary history and, more than eighty years after its original anonymous publication, a classic of American fiction. The first fictional memoir ever written by a black, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man influenced a generation of writers during the Harlem Renaissance and served as eloquent inspiration for Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. In the 1920s and since, it has also given white readers a startling new perspective on their own culture, revealing to many the double standard of...
James Weldon Johnson's emotionally gripping novel is a landmark in black literary history and, more than eighty years after its original anonymous ...
With 200,000 copies in print, this anthology has for decades been seen as a fundamental collection of African-American verse. Bontemps (1902-73), an important figure during and after the Harlem Renaissance, author of more than 25 novels, and longtime librarian at Fisk University, last revised this classic anthology just before his death, adding such crucial new voices as Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Bob Kaufman, among others.
This edition, issued in 1996, reprints the poems in Bontemps's revised volume along with updated biographical notes. Nearly seventy poets are represented,...
With 200,000 copies in print, this anthology has for decades been seen as a fundamental collection of African-American verse. Bontemps (1902-73), a...
"Five Black Lives is a collection of ex-slave narratives which spans 150 years in time, from 1729 to 1870, and some thousands of miles in geographical area from Africa to Connecticut. The autobiographies include the lives of Venture Smith, a native of Africa who ended his days as a resident of East Haddam, Connecticut; James Mars, born a slave near Norfolk, Connecticut in 1790, and freed at twenty-five by state law; William Grimes, a native of Virginia, who became Connecticut's first known runway when he arrived in New Haven about 1808; G.W. Offley, from Maryland, who was bought free by his...
"Five Black Lives is a collection of ex-slave narratives which spans 150 years in time, from 1729 to 1870, and some thousands of miles in geographical...
Arna Wendell Bontemps Michael P. Bibler Jessica D. Adams
A story of love, violence, and race set at the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, African American writer Arna Bontemps's Drums at Dusk immerses readers in the opulent and brutal -- yet also very fragile -- society of France's richest colony, Saint Domingue. First published in 1939, this novel explores the complex web of tensions connecting wealthy plantation owners, poor whites, free people of color, and the slaves who stunned the colony and the globe by uniting in a carefully planned uprising. The novel's hero, Diron Desautels, a white Creole born in Saint Domingue who belongs...
A story of love, violence, and race set at the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, African American writer Arna Bontemps's Drums at Dusk im...
