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. It remains his most studied and popular work its insights into Negro life at the turn of the 20th century still ring true.

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. 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.

'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. A distinguished author has contributed an introduction for each volume, which also includes a detailed chronology of the author's life and career, an essay on the choice of the text, and notes. 'The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,' he writes, prophesying the struggle for freedom that became his life's work.įor the first time, the authoritative editions of works by major American novelists, poets, scholars, and essayists collected in the hardcover volumes of The Library of America are being published singly in a series of handsome and durable paperback books. Here, Du Bois records the cruelties of racism, celebrates the strength and pride of black America, and explores the paradoxical 'double-consciousness' of African-American life. The Souls of Black Folk (1903), his most influential work, is a collection of fourteen beautifully written essays, by turns lyrical, historical, and autobiographical. Du Bois was the foremost black intellectual of his time.

The souls of black folk isbn