W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the most celebrated intellectuals of the twentieth century, published Darkwater -- a powerful collection of essays, verse and fiction -- in 1920, two decades after his most famous book, The Souls of Black Folk. Throughout his long life and extraordinary career as a scholar, activist, writer and educator, Du Bois's body of work illumined America's understanding of the "problem of the color line." While much of his early texts were sociological investigations of the Black community, the author increasingly incorporated autobiographical, poetic and spiritual...

William Du Bois was one of only a handful of blacks to be born in New England during the 1860s. His experience of racism there led directly to his commitment to equal rights, and to his writing 'The Souls of Black Folk', in which Dr. Du Bois aspired to portray what it was like to be black in the final years of the nineteenth century. The book has amply fulfilled its author's hopes, and according to critic and essayist Henry Louis Gates, Jnr. "has served as a veritable touch-stone for every successive generation of black scholars since."