Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Welcomed on publication as "brilliant, definitive, and a joy to teach from," The Norton Anthology of African American Literaturewas adopted at more than 1,275 colleges and universities worldwide. Now, the new Second Edition offers these highlights.
About the Author
Henry Louis Gates Jr.(Ph.D. Cambridge) is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, at Harvard University. He is the author of Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism; Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars; Colored People: A Memoir; The Future of Race(with Cornel West); Wonders of the African World; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man; and America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans. He is general editor (with the late Nellie Y. McKay) of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature; editor-in-chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center (online); editor of The African-American Century(with Cornel West); Encarta Africana(with Kwame Anthony Appiah); and The Bondwoman’s Narrativeby Hannah Craft; African American National Biography(with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham) and The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin(with Hollis Robbins). For PBS, Professor Gates has written and produced several documentaries, among them African American Lives, series 1 and 2, and America Behind the Color Line.Nellie Y. McKay(Ph.D. Harvard), General Editor. Professor of American and Afro-American Literature, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Associate editor of the African American Review; author of Jean Toomer'"the Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894'"1936; editor of Critical Essays on Toni Morrison; co-editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Harriet Jacobs"s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Beloved'"A Casebook, and Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Toni Morrison.William L. Andrews(Ph.D. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Editor, "The Literature of Slavery and Freedom," Co-Editor, "the Literature of the Reconstruction to the New Negro Renaissance." E. Maynard Adams Professor of English, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. General editor of the Wisconsin Studies in American Autobiography series and The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology, and co-editor of The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Other works include The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt; To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865; Sisters of the Spirit; Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass; and Classic Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance.Houston A. Baker, Jr.(Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles), Editor, "The Black Arts Era." George D. and Susan Fox Beischer Professor of English, Duke University. Editor of American Literature; Editor of the anthology Black Literature in Americaand author of three books of poetry. Other works include Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and The Black Aesthetic; Workings of the Spirit: A Poetics of Afro-American Women"s Writing; Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy; Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory; Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T.Frances Smith Foster(Ph.D. University of California, San Diego), Co-Editor, "The Literature of the Reconstruction to the New Negro Renaissance." Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women"s Studies, Emory University. Author of Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746'"1892and Witnessing Slavery: The Development of the Antebellum Slave Narrative. Co-editor of the Oxford Companion to African American Literatureand the Norton Critical Edition of Harriet Jacobs"s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Editor of several works, including Minnie"s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Elizabeth Keckley"s Behind the Scenes.A former fellow of the Bunting Institute and the Woodrow Wilson International Center, Deborah E. McDowellis a professor of English at the University of Virginia.Robert G. O"Meally(Ph.D. Harvard), Editor, "The Vernacular Tradition." Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English, Columbia University. Author of The Craft of Ralph Ellisonand the biography Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, and editor of the essay collection History and Memory in African American Culture. Currently editing an essay collection titled The Jazz Cadence of American Culture.Arnold Rampersad(Ph.D. Harvard), Editor, "The Harlem Renaissance." Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University. Co-Editor of Slavery and the Literary Imagination(with Deborah E. McDowell); editor of the definitive Collected Poems of Langston Hughesand author of the two-volume biography The Life of Langston Hughes. Also author of Jackie Robinson: A Biographyand joint author of tennis star Arthur Ashe"s Days of Grace: A Memoir.Hortense Spillers(Ph.D. Brandeis), Co-Editor, "Realism, Naturalism, Modernism." Frederick J. Whiton Chair of English, Cornell University. Editor of Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text; co-editor (with Marjorie Pryse) of Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and the Literary Tradition, and an editor of The Heath Anthology of American Literature.Cheryl A. Wall(Ph.D. Harvard), Editor, "Literature since 1975." Professor and Chair of English, Rutgers University. Author of Women of the Harlem Renaissance; editor of Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories, Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs & Other Writings, and Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women.