The most memorable passages are contained in 'On Booker T. 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. 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. Washington.įar 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. 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. 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.

Du Bois in The Souls Of Black Folk, one of the most prophetic and influental works in American literature. 'The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.' Thus speaks W.E.B.

The souls of black