Early African-American Classics

by Kwame Anthony Appiah (Editor)

This essential one-volume collection brings together some of the most influential and significant works by African-American writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
 
Included herein are such classics as Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845) and excerpts from W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Harriet A. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Written by Herself (1861), Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901), and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912).
 
Whether read as records of African-American history, autobiography, or literature, these invaluable texts stand as timeless monuments to the courage, intellect, and dignity of those for whom writing itself was an act of rebellion—and whose voices and experiences would have otherwise been silenced forever.
 
Edited and with an introduction by Anthony Appiah, who explains the distinctive American literary and cultural context of the time, this edition of Early African-American Classics remains the standard by which all similar collections will inevitably be compared.

Genres: History, Classics, Nonfiction, Literature

704 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published April 1, 1990

About the author

Kwame Anthony Appiah, the president of the PEN American Center, is the author of The Ethics of Identity, Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, The Honor Code and the prize-winning Cosmopolitanism. Raised in Ghana and educated in England, he has taught philosophy on three continents and is a former professor at Princeton University and currently has a position at NYU.

Series:
* Sir Patrick Scott Mystery (as Anthony Appiah)

Reviews

[Djll · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essential reading, if you care about understanding America. Harriet Jacobs' account, while penned in the flavorful prose of its day (pub. 1861), is riveting, and serves as a reminder that the institution of slavery is probably the most vile and evil thing human minds have ever created. Her story tells of how institutionalized, legalized slavery poisons EVERY human contact and societal interaction, creating a world where no one can be trusted or loved, without some form of transaction seeping in to tip the scales in favor of the wealthy and privileged.

[Nisha Sharma · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never felt the misery of a slave as much as i did through this book.. I was so engrossed and absorbed in the narrative that I suffered through their sufferings and rejoiced with their freedom.. I felt their pain with each lash that was inflicted on their innocent bodies, scarring their minds and crushing their souls, inflicting a wound so deep that it scarred generations and shamed the man who inflicted them to eternal inferno. I weeped with the mothers whose children were not theirs but commodities born in slavery, to be sold off as and when the 'massa' deemed fit. Women being raped, men being subjected to unimaginable humiliations, children being robbed of their childhood, old 'slaves' being left to die, ruthless murders and indiscriminate bloodshed..

This book made me realise how much we take the most important things in life for granted and worry about the things that hold least importance in the larger scheme of things..

May humanity never stoop down as low as the white man did in crushing the souls of his own brethren..