William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) is the greatest of African American intellectuals--a sociologist, historian, novelist, and activist whose astounding career spanned the nation's history from Reconstruction to the civil rights movement. Born in Massachusetts and educated at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, Du Bois penned his epochal masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903. It remains his most studied and popular work; its insights into Negro life at the turn of the 20th century still ring true.

With a dash of the Victorian and Enlightenment influences that peppered his impassioned yet formal prose, the book's largely autobiographical chapters take the reader through the momentous and moody maze of Afro-American life after the Emancipation Proclamation: from poverty, the neoslavery of the sharecropper, illiteracy, miseducation, and lynching, to the heights of humanity reached by the spiritual "sorrow songs" that birthed gospel and the blues. The most memorable passages are contained in "On Booker T. Washington and Others," where Du Bois criticizes his famous contemporary's rejection of higher education and accommodationist stance toward white racism: "Mr. Washington's programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races," he writes, further complaining that Washington's thinking "withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens." The capstone of The Souls of Black Folk, though, is Du Bois' haunting, eloquent description of the concept of the black psyche's "double consciousness," which he described as "a peculiar sensation.... One ever feels this twoness--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." Thanks to W.E.B. Du Bois' commitment and foresight--and the intellectual excellence expressed in this timeless literary gem--black Americans can today look in the mirror and rejoice in their beautiful black, brown, and beige reflections. --Eugene Holley Jr.


The New York Times Book Review
Sentimental, poetical, picturesque, the acquired logic of the evident attempt to be critically fair-minded is strangely tangled with these racial characteristics and racial rhetoric.


Review
“One hundred years after publication, there is in the entire body of social criticism still no more than a handful of meditations on the promise and failings of democracy in America to rival William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s extraordinary collection of fourteen essays.” —from the Introduction by David Levering Lewis


Review
?One hundred years after publication, there is in the entire body of social criticism still no more than a handful of meditations on the promise and failings of democracy in America to rival William Edward Burghardt Du Bois?s extraordinary collection of fourteen essays.? ?from the Introduction by David Levering Lewis


Book Description
Introduction by Arnold Rampersad


Download Description
First published in 1903, this eloquent collection of essays exposed the magnitude of racism in society. The book endures today as a classic document of American and political history.


Card catalog description
One of the most influential and widely read texts in all of African American letters and history, The Souls of Black Folk combines some of the most enduring reflections on black identity, the meaning of emancipation, and African American culture. This new edition reprints the original 1903 edition of W. E. B. Du Bois's classic work with the fullest set of annotations of any version yet published, together with two related essays, and numerous letters Du Bois received and wrote concerning his widely read text. The introductory essay combines the sensibilities of a historian and a philosopher to capture the contours of Du Bois's life and writings along with the early-twentieth-century reception to the book. Photographs, a chronology, questions for consideration, a bibliography, and an index are also included.


From the Publisher
"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." Thus speaks W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls Of Black Folk, one of the most prophetic and influental works in American literature. In this eloquent collection of essays, first published in 1903, Du Bois dares as no one has before to describe the magnitude of American racism and demand an end to it. He draws on his own life for illustration, from his early experiences teaching in the hills of Tennessee to the death of his infant son and his historic break with the conciliatory position of Booker T. Washington.Far ahead of its time, The Souls Of Black Folk both anticipated and inspired much of the black conciousness and activism of the 1960's and is a classic in the literature of civil rights. The elegance of DuBois's prose and the passion of his message are as crucial today as they were upon the book's first publication.


From the Inside Flap
Introduction by Arnold Rampersad


From the Back Cover
“One hundred years after publication, there is in the entire body of social criticism still no more than a handful of meditations on the promise and failings of democracy in America to rival William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s extraordinary collection of fourteen essays.” —from the Introduction by David Levering Lewis


About the Author
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963), writer, civil rights activist, scholar, and editor, is one of the most significant intellectuals in American history. A founding member of the NAACP, editor for many years of The Crisis and three other journals, and author of seventeen books, his writings, speeches, and public debates brought fundamental changes to American race relations.

David Levering Lewis is Martin Luther King, Jr., University Professor in the department of history at Rutgers University. He won Pulitzer prizes for both volumes of his landmark biography of W.E.B. Du Bois, along with many other awards, including the Bancroft and Parkman prizes. He lives in Manhattan.

ANNOTATION

First published in 1903, this extraordinary work not only recorded and explained history, it helped to alter its course. Written after Du Bois had earned his Ph.D. from Harvard and studied in Berlin, these 14 essays contain both the academic language of sociology and the rich lyrics of African spirituals, which Du Bois called "sorrow songs." New introduction by Randall Kenan. Major school adoption title.

FROM THE PUBLISHER