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Summary
Summary
From an American Book Award-winning author comes a pungent and poignant masterpiece of recollection that ushers readers into a now-vanished "colored" world and extends and deepens our sense of African-American history, even as it entrances us with its bravura storytelling. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Author Notes
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was born on September 16, 1950, in Keyser, West Virginia. He received a degree in history from Yale University in 1973 and a Ph.D. from Clare College, which is part of the University of Cambridge in 1979. He is a leading scholar of African-American literature, history, and culture. He began working on the Black Periodical Literature Project, which uncovered lost literary works published in 1800s. He rediscovered what is believed to be the first novel published by an African-American in the United States. He republished the 1859 work by Harriet E. Wilson, entitled Our Nig, in 1983.
He has written numerous books including Colored People: A Memoir, A Chronology of African-American History, The Future of the Race, Black Literature and Literary Theory, and The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. In 1991, he became the head of the African-American studies department at Harvard University. He is now the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at the university.
He wrote and produced several documentaries including Wonders of the African World, America Beyond the Color Line, and African American Lives. He has also hosted PBS programs such as Wonders of the African World, Black in Latin America, and Finding Your Roots.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
National Book Award winner Gates reflects on his childhood in pre-civil rights Piedmont, W.Va. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
A remembrance of childhood and youth in the 1950s and 1960s that is almost elegiac in its soft tone. Gates is a noted scholar who's currently head of the African American Studies Department at Harvard; he was born and raised in the little community of Piedmont, West Virginia. It's a place of physical beauty--and, obviously, from his eloquent words, a place where, despite the separateness its black citizens felt, there existed a "sort of segregated peace." Without anger, Gates explains that, as he grew into an awareness of sexuality and religion, he was also aware of a color line in Piedmont. Gates nonetheless imparts a definite sense that he enjoyed a reasonable degree of comfort and security as he passed from child to young adult. The civil rights movement came slowly to Piedmont, mostly by way of television pictures of strife and reaction taking place elsewhere. The town no longer exists as it did, but Gates' ease with himself is due to a large extent to how the town was back then. His is an important document--to say nothing of a beautiful work of prose--in the literature of growing up. Hand his book to any reader keen on autobiography. (Reviewed Apr. 1, 1994)0679421793Brad Hooper
Kirkus Review
One of the country's top black scholars offers a tender memoir of his youth in a West Virginia paper mill town in the 1950s and '60s. Gates (African-American Studies/Harvard) trades the academic jargon of his literary criticism (as in Loose Canons, 1992) for a dead-on conversational voice threaded with black vernacular. ``I am not native to the great black metropolises,'' he declares at the outset, yet in Piedmont, a town of 2,100 (circa 1950) in northeastern West Virginia, race contoured existence. The civil rights era, pictured on television, arrived slowly, as ``school was virtually the only integrated arena'' after Brown v. Board of Education. But Gates's world was rich: He describes sex education in a talky barbershop, self-righteous teetotalers on his mother's side, and card-playing punsters on his father's. He battled with his sardonic father, a millworker; retreated to the church to cope with a depressive mother; grew enamored of Africa in current events class; and became a reader to bridge the gap with a white girl whose friendship he lost as puberty arrived. In church camp, at the time of the Watts riots, he first read James Baldwin, whose picture seemed ``so very Negro.'' Gates began battling with his relatives as he grew the first Afro in town, proclaimed himself black, and moved on to the local state college five miles away. But he knows enough now to wince at some of his rhetoric and to celebrate his mother's earlier civil rights protests. Gates ends the book with a warm portrait of the last segregated black mill picnic, which he convincingly depicts as a loss to the black community under integration. Gates left West Virginia for Yale and a meteoric career; the worlds he has seen since should someday make a terrific sequel.
Library Journal Review
The man touted as America's most celebrated black scholar reminisces to his daughters about his boyhood in the polluted, dying Allegheny Mountains' papermill town of Piedmont, West Virginia. Laying out the social and emotional topography of a world shifting from segregation to integration and from colored to Negro to black, Gates evokes a bygone time and place as he moves from his birth in 1949 to 1969, when he goes off to Yale University after a year at West Virginia's Potomac State College. His pensive and sometimes wistful narrative brims with the mysteries and pangs and lifelong aches of growing up, from his encounters with sexuality, to the discovery of intellectual exhilaration as he is marked to excel in school, to his suffering a crippling injury to one of his legs and struggling frightfully for his father's respect. There is much to recommend this book as a story of boyhood, family, segregation, the pre-Civil Rights era, and the era when Civil Rights filtered down from television to local reality. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/94.]-Thomas J. Davis, SUNY at Buffalo (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.