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Stumbling Blocks

Author : Delores Phillips

Publisher : University of Georgia Press

Page : 403 pages

File Size : 36,87 MB

Release : 2023

Category : Biography & Autobiography

ISBN : 0820364959

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Book Description

"Stumbling Blocks expands and contextualizes the unpublished works of the late African American writer Delores Phillips. Born in Cartersville, Georgia in 1950, Delores Faye Phillips spent much of her childhood in Georgia before moving to Cleveland, Ohio. Best known for her 2004 novel The Darkest Child, which follows the Quinn family as they attempt to survive and escape racism, lynchings, and poverty in Jim Crow Georgia during the 1950s, Phillips wrote much more than that. While the novel was met with critical acclaim (won Black Caucus of the ALA Award and was a nominee for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Phillips), little is known about Phillips herself or about her other writings. In fact, in the 2018 reissue of The Darkest Child, Tayari Jones remarks in the introduction that when she heard Phillips had passed away in 2014, she was "weighted down with longing for the other books that she would never write." This volume, then, corrects the misconception that The Darkest Child was Phillips's only published work. Rather, it establishes her as an experienced and prolific writer who created multi-genre literature throughout her life. It paints a broader picture of Phillips, who was not just a novelist, but also a poet and short story writer as well. Much like Alice Walker's recovery work on Zora Neale Hurston in the 1970s was critical to a revival and appreciation of Hurston as "a genius of the South," Stumbling Blocks expands the legacy and illuminates an under-represented writer who is uniquely situated at the intersections of multiple identities including race, gender, disability, and region. In addition to the sequel to The Darkest Child, this collection also includes an unfinished third novel (No Ordinary Rain), ten poems, seven short stories, contextualizing essays, and an in-depth biography of Phillips. It is also bookended by a foreword from Phillips sister, Linda Miller, and an afterword from Trudier Harris"--



Stumbling Blocks and Other Unfinished Work

Author : Delores Phillips

Publisher : University of Georgia Press

Page : 509 pages

File Size : 24,46 MB

Release : 2023-10-15

Category : Literary Collections

ISBN : 0820364940

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Book Description

Stumbling Blocks expands and contextualizes the unpublished works of the late African American writer Delores Phillips. Born in Cartersville, Georgia in 1950, Delores Faye Phillips spent much of her childhood in Georgia before moving to Cleveland, Ohio. Best known for her 2004 novel The Darkest Child, which follows the Quinn family as they attempt to survive and escape racism, lynchings, and poverty in Jim Crow Georgia during the 1950s, Phillips wrote much more than that. While the novel was met with critical acclaim, little is known about Phillips herself or about her other writings. Indeed, in the 2018 reissue of The Darkest Child, Tayari Jones remarks in the introduction that when she heard Phillips had passed away in 2014, she was “weighted down with longing for the other books that she would never write.” This volume, then, corrects the misconception that The Darkest Child was Phillips’s only published work. Rather, it establishes her as an experienced and prolific writer who created multi-genre literature throughout her life. It paints a broader picture of Phillips, who was not just a novelist but also a poet and short story writer as well. Just as Alice Walker’s recovery work on Zora Neale Hurston in the 1970s was critical to a revival and appreciation of Hurston as “a genius of the South,” Stumbling Blocks illuminates and expands the legacy of an underrepresented writer who is uniquely situated at the intersections of multiple identities including race, gender, disability, and region. In addition to the sequel to The Darkest Child, this collection also includes an unfinished third novel (No Ordinary Rain), ten poems, seven short stories, contextualizing essays, and an in-depth biography of Phillips. It is also bookended by a foreword from Phillips’s sister, Linda Miller, and an afterword from renowned literary scholar Trudier Harris.



The Darkest Child

Author : Delores Phillips

Publisher : Soho Press

Page : 433 pages

File Size : 30,29 MB

Release : 2018-01-30

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 1616958723

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Book Description

A new edition of this award-winning modern classic, with an introduction by Tayari Jones (An American Marriage), an excerpt from the never before seen follow-up, and discussion guide. Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle’s, estimation, but she’s also the brightest. Rozelle—beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned—exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment, she pulls them from school at the age of twelve and sends them to earn their keep for the household, whether in domestic service, in the fields, or at “the farmhouse” on the edge of town, where Rozelle beds local men for money. But Tangy Mae has been selected to be part of the first integrated class at a nearby white high school. She has a chance to change her life, but can she break from Rozelle’s grasp without ruinous—even fatal—consequences?



Ralph Ellison

Author : Lawrence Patrick Jackson

Publisher : University of Georgia Press

Page : 524 pages

File Size : 33,94 MB

Release : 2007

Category : Biography & Autobiography

ISBN : 9780820329932

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Book Description

Author, intellectual, and social critic, Ralph Ellison (1914-94) was a pivotal figure in American literature and history and arguably the father of African American modernism. Universally acclaimed for his first novel, Invisible Man, a masterpiece of modern fiction, Ellison was recognized with a stunning succession of honors, including the 1953 National Book Award. Despite his literary accomplishments and political activism, however, Ellison has received surprisingly sparse treatment from biographers. Lawrence Jackson’s biography of Ellison, the first when it was published in 2002, focuses on the author’s early life. Powerfully enhanced by rare photographs, this work draws from archives, literary correspondence, and interviews with Ellison’s relatives, friends, and associates. Tracing the writer’s path from poverty in dust bowl Oklahoma to his rise among the literary elite, Jackson explores Ellison’s important relationships with other stars, particularly Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and examines his previously undocumented involvement in the Socialist Left of the 1930s and 1940s, the black radical rights movement of the same period, and the League of American Writers. The result is a fascinating portrait of a fraternal cadre of important black writers and critics--and the singularly complex and intriguing man at its center.



The Art and Life of Clarence Major

Author : Keith E. Byerman

Publisher :

Page : 0 pages

File Size : 47,53 MB

Release : 2016-05-15

Category : Biography & Autobiography

ISBN : 9780820349824

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Book Description

Clarence Major is an award-winning painter, fiction writer, and poet-as well as an essayist, editor, anthologist, lexicographer, and memoirist. He has been part of twenty-eight group exhibitions, has had fifteen one-man shows, and has published fourteen collections of poetry and nine works of fiction. The author traces Major's life and career from his complex family history in Georgia through his encounters with important literary and artistic figures in Chicago and New York to his present status as a respected writer, artist, teacher, and scholar living in California.



Jack London's Racial Lives

Author : Jeanne Campbell Reesman

Publisher : University of Georgia Press

Page : 448 pages

File Size : 34,38 MB

Release : 2011-03-15

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 0820339709

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Book Description

Jack London (1876-1916), known for his naturalistic and mythic tales, remains among the most popular and influential American writers in the world. Jack London's Racial Lives offers the first full study of the enormously important issue of race in London's life and diverse works, whether set in the Klondike, Hawaii, or the South Seas or during the Russo-Japanese War, the Jack Johnson world heavyweight bouts, or the Mexican Revolution. Jeanne Campbell Reesman explores his choices of genre by analyzing racial content and purpose and judges his literary artistry against a standard of racial tolerance. Although he promoted white superiority in novels and nonfiction, London sharply satirized racism and meaningfully portrayed racial others--most often as protagonists--in his short fiction. Why the disparity? For London, racial and class identity were intertwined: his formation as an artist began with the mixed "heritage" of his family. His mother taught him racism, but he learned something different from his African American foster mother, Virginia Prentiss. Childhood poverty, shifting racial allegiances, and a "psychology of want" helped construct the many "houses" of race and identity he imagined. Reesman also examines London's socialism, his study of Darwin and Jung, and the illnesses he suffered in the South Seas. With new readings of The Call of the Wild, Martin Eden, and many other works, such as the explosive Pacific stories, Reesman reveals that London employed many of the same literary tropes of race used by African American writers of his period: the slave narrative, double-consciousness, the tragic mulatto, and ethnic diaspora. Hawaii seemed to inspire his most memorable visions of a common humanity.



Visible Man

Author : Jeffrey B. Leak

Publisher : University of Georgia Press

Page : 224 pages

File Size : 35,57 MB

Release : 2014-04-15

Category : Biography & Autobiography

ISBN : 0820347108

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Book Description

Henry Dumas (1934–1968) was a writer who did not live to see most of his fiction and poetry in print. A son of Sweet Home, Arkansas, and Harlem, he devoted himself to the creation of a black literary cosmos, one in which black literature and culture were windows into the human condition. While he certainly should be understood in the context of the cultural and political movements of the 1960s—Black Arts, Black Power, and Civil Rights—his writing, and ultimately his life, were filled with ambiguities and contradictions. Dumas was shot and killed in 1968 in Harlem months before his thirty-fourth birthday by a white transit policeman under circumstances never fully explained. After his death he became a kind of literary legend, but one whose full story was unknown. A devoted cadre of friends and later admirers from the 1970s to the present pushed for the publication of his work. Toni Morrison championed him as “an absolute genius.” Amiri Baraka, a writer not quick to praise others, claimed that Dumas produced “actual art, real, man, and stunning.” Eugene Redmond and Quincy Troupe heralded Dumas's poetry, short stories, and work as an editor of “little” magazines. With Visible Man, Jeffrey B. Leak offers a full examination of both Dumas's life and his creative development. Given unprecedented access to the Dumas archival materials and numerous interviews with family, friends, and writers who knew him in various contexts, Leak opens the door to Dumas's rich and at times frustrating life, giving us a layered portrait of an African American writer and his coming of age during one of the most volatile and transformative decades in American history.



Conrad Aiken

Author : Edward Butscher

Publisher : University of Georgia Press

Page : 546 pages

File Size : 36,68 MB

Release : 2010-06-01

Category : Biography & Autobiography

ISBN : 0820336203

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Book Description

The first of a planned two-volume biography, Conrad Aiken: Poet of White Horse Vale follows Aiken's early life from his birth in 1889 to 1925 when he stood on the threshold of both nervous breakdown and poetic success. It was then that Aiken began to face his paradoxically idyllic and tragic Savannah childhood and to confront the events of February 27, 1901. On that day, the eleven-year-old Aiken heard gunshots punctuate a nightlong argument between his mother and father. Running into the next room, he discovered his mother murdered and his father dead by suicide. Sounding the deep reverberations of those events in Aiken's mind, Edward Butscher follows the poet's life and work as he sought to regain, in some permanent form, the idyll he had lost as a child. Butscher tells of Aiken's determined efforts to gain recognition for his verse in the fevered cultural circuits of the early twentieth century—from his friendship, begun at Harvard, with T. S. Eliot, through frustrating excursions into the literary society of England and repeated trips on the poetic “trade route” from his home in Boston to Chicago and New York, to often sharp encounters with such powerful cultural barons as Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Harriet Monroe. Hoping to build his reputation on a series of detached poetic “symphonies,” to keep depression from boiling over into madness and suicide, Aiken skirted the border of his deepest memories and fears—a border he would cross in the works that lay ahead.



John Oliver Killens

Author : Keith Gilyard

Publisher : University of Georgia Press

Page : 458 pages

File Size : 24,46 MB

Release : 2011-11-01

Category : Biography & Autobiography

ISBN : 0820341959

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Book Description

John Oliver Killens's politically charged novels And Then We Heard the Thunder and The Cotillion; or One Good Bull Is Half the Herd, were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His works of fiction and nonfiction, the most famous of which is his novel Youngblood, have been translated into more than a dozen languages. An influential novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and teacher, he was the founding chair of the Harlem Writers Guild and mentored a generation of black writers at Fisk, Howard, Columbia, and elsewhere. Killens is recognized as the spiritual father of the Black Arts Movement. In this first major biography of Killens, Keith Gilyard examines the life and career of the man who was perhaps the premier African American writer-activist from the 1950s to the 1980s. Gilyard extends his focus to the broad boundaries of Killens's times and literary achievement--from the Old Left to the Black Arts Movement and beyond. Figuring prominently in these pages are the many important African American artists and political figures connected to the author from the 1930s to the 1980s--W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Alphaeus Hunton, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Harry Belafonte, and Maya Angelou, among others.



The Lonely Hunter

Author : Virginia Spencer Carr

Publisher : University of Georgia Press

Page : 680 pages

File Size : 19,91 MB

Release : 2003

Category : Biography & Autobiography

ISBN : 9780820325224

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Book Description

The Lonely Hunter is widely accepted as the standard biography of Carson McCullers. Author of such landmarks of modern American fiction as Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Ballad of the Sad Café, Carson McCullers was the enfant terrible of the literary world of the 1940s and 1950s. Gifted but tormented, vulnerable but exploitative, McCullers led a life that had all the elements--and more--of a tragic novel. From McCullers's birth in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917 to her death in upstate New York in 1967, The Lonely Hunter thoroughly covers every significant event in, and aspect of, the writer's life: her rise as a young literary sensation; her emotional, artistic, and sexual eccentricities and entanglements; her debilitating illnesses; her travels in America and Europe; and the provenance of her works from their earliest drafts through their book, stage, and film versions. To research her subject, Virginia Spencer Carr visited all of the important places in McCullers's life, read virtually everything written by or about her, and interviewed hundreds of McCullers's relatives, friends, and enemies. The result is an enduring, distinguished portrait of a brilliant, but deeply troubled, writer.