In his autobiography, Mark Twain confesses that “from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race—never quite sane in the night.” Of all the memories and fears that disturbed Twain’s peace of mind, none are more intractable than those associated with White fathers, Black men, the histories they reflect, and the future they promise. The Ghosts of Mark Twain: A Study of Manhood, Race, and the Gothic Imagination investigates these tense intersections in Twain’s life and work....

This groundbreaking volume explores the importance of economics and prosperity throughout Samuel Clemens’s writing and personal life.Mark Twain and Money: Language, Capital, and Culture focuses on an overlooked feature of the story of one of America’s most celebrated writers. Investigating Samuel Clemens’s often conflicting but insightful views on the roles of money in American culture and identity, this collection of essays shows how his fascination with ...

In 1773, the slave Phillis Wheatley literally wrote her way to freedom. The first person of African descent to publish a book of poems in English, she was emancipated by her owners in recognition of her literary achievement. For a time, Wheatley was the most famous black woman in the West. But Thomas Jefferson, unlike his contemporaries Ben Franklin and George Washington, refused to acknowledge her gifts as a writer -- a repudiation that eventually inspired generations of black writers to ...

A finalist for the 1972 National Book Award, hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "brilliant" and "provocative," Nathan Huggins' Harlem Renaissance was a milestone in the study of African-American life and culture. Now this classic history is being reissued, with a new foreword by acclaimed biographer Arnold Rampersad. As Rampersad notes, "Harlem Renaissance remains an indispensable guide to the facts and features, the puzzles and mysteries, of one of the ...

With the same intellectual incisiveness and supple, stylish prose he brought to his classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison examines his antecedents and in so doing illuminates the literature, music, and culture of both black and white America. His range is virtuosic, encompassing Mark Twain and Richard Wright, Mahalia Jackson and Charlie Parker, The Birth of a Nation and the Dante-esque landscape of Harlem−"the scene and symbol of the Negro's perpetual alienation in t...

A Dog's Tale' is a short story written by Mark Twain. It first appeared in the December 1903 issue of Harper's magazine. In January of the following year it was extracted into a stand-alone pamphlet published for the National Anti-Vivisection Society. Still later in 1904 it was expanded into a book published by Harper & Brothers. Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

**A New York Times Notable Book • Shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Society's Christian Gauss Award for Outstanding Books in Literary Scholarship“Henry Louis Gates is a national treasure. Here, he returns with an intellectual and at times deeply personal meditation on the hard-fought evolution and the very meaning of African American identity, calling upon our country to transcend its manufactured divisions.” — Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns...

Table of Contents:How to Tell a Story The Wounded Soldier The Golden Arm Mental Telegraphy Again The Invalid's StoryHow to Tell a Story and Other Essays (1895) is a series of essays by Mark Twain. In them he describes his own writing style, attacks the idiocy of a fellow author, defends the virtue of a dead woman, and tries to protect ordinary citizens from insults by railroad conductors.- Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A genteel southern intellectual, saloniste, and wife to a prominent colonel in Jefferson Davis’s inner circle, Mary Chesnut today is remembered best for her penetrating Civil War diary. Composed between 1861 and 1865 and revised thoroughly from the late 1870s until Chesnut’s death in 1886, the diary was published first in 1905, again in 1949, and later, to great acclaim, in 1981. This complicated literary history and the questions that attend it—which edition represents the real Chesnut? T...

When Black Culture and Black Consciousness first appeared thirty years ago, it marked a revolution in our understanding of African American history. Contrary to prevailing ideas at the time, which held that African culture disappeared quickly under slavery and that black Americans had little group pride, history, or cohesiveness, Levine uncovered a cultural treasure trove, illuminating a rich and complex African American oral tradition, including songs, proverbs, jokes, folktales,...

Mark Twain, who was often photographed with a cigar, once remarked that he came into the world looking for a light. In this new biography, published on the centennial of the writer’s death, Jerome Loving focuses on Mark Twain, humorist and quipster, and sheds new light on the wit, pathos, and tragedy of the author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In brisk and compelling fashion, Loving follows Twain from Hannibal to Hawaii to the Holy Land, showing how the southerner transformed...

**Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer edits a collection of Alain Locke's influential essays on the importance of the Black artist and the Black imaginationA Penguin Classic**For months, the philosopher Alain Locke wrestled with the idea of the Negro as America's most vexing problem. He asked how shall Negroes think of themselves as he considered the new crop of poets, novelists, and short story writers who, in 1924, wrote about their experiences as Black people in America. H...