“Few books make history and fewer still become foundational texts for the movements and struggles of an entire people. The Souls of Black Folk occupies this rare position.”
--Manning Marable

W.E.B. DuBois was the foremost black intellectual of his time. The Souls of Black Folk (1903), his most influential work, is a collection of fourteen beautifully written essays, by turns lyrical, historical, and autobiographical. 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 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.

Library of America Paperback Classics feature authoritative texts drawn from the acclaimed Library of America series and introduced by todayÂ’s most distinguished scholars and writers. Each book features a detailed chronology of the authorÂ’s life and career, and essay on the choice of the text, and notes.

The contents of this Paperback Classic are drawn from W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings, volume number 34 in the Library of America series; that volume also includes The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, Dusk of Dawn, articles from The Crisis, and selected essays....

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 life at the turn of the 20th century still ring true....

A study of the transition of African Americans from slavery to freedom at the turn of the 20th century. This book examines the role of government, economics and the current African American leadership in the developement of the African American from the time of emancipation through the beginning of the twentieth century. This is an unabridged reading of the classic book which was originally published in 1903....

When first published in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk struck like a thunderclap, quickly establishing itself as a work that wholly redefined the history of the black experience in America, introducing the now famous “problem of the color line.” In decades since, its stature has only grown, and today it ranks as one of the most influential and resonant works in the history of American thought.

This centennial edition contains a landmark Introduction by historian David Levering Lewis that brilliantly demonstrates how The Souls of Black Folk remains indispensable not only to an understanding of the history of race and democracy in America but to considerations of the future of racial and cultural comity in the twenty-first century....

A moving cultural biography of abolitionist martyr John Brown, by one of the most important African-American intellectuals of the twentieth century.

In the history of slavery and its legacy, John Brown looms large as a hero whose deeds partly precipitated the Civil War. As Frederick Douglass wrote: "When John Brown stretched forth his arm ... the clash of arms was at hand." DuBois's biography brings Brown stirringly to life and is a neglected classic.

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