Review by Booklist Review
Walker is well known in academic circles for her important contribution to black literature, both as an award-winning creative writer (her published works include the poetry anthologies For My People and This Is My Century and the acclaimed novel Jubilee) and as a talented scholar (she's professor emeritus of English at Mississippi's Jackson State University, whose black studies program she founded, and a biographer of Richard Wright). In the current volume, a collection of Walker's personal essays and speeches, this former student of such literary giants as Langston Hughes and Richard Wright critically examines the writings of these and other less personally familiar African American authors (James Baldwin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Georgia Douglas Johnson, among others) and reflects on her own work as an artist, an Afro-American, and a woman. Spanning a half-century (1943 to 1988), these brilliant, intimate writings capture the flavor of the times and powerfully convey the social and literary thought that distinguishes Walker as one of the intellectual beacons of her generation. Index. --Mary Banas
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
While Walker is generally acknowledged to be an important 20th-century poet and novelist, this first collection of her essays will further secure her place in American political and cultural life. The essays, written over the last 50+ years of Walker's career as a writer, teacher, scholar, and activist, compellingly recount the personal history of a woman for whom individual expression is an essential form of the struggle against racism, sexism, and classism. Her readings of Southern writers represent an original way of thinking about how race figures in the work of white and black writers. Walker's radical humanist perspective ought to reinvigorate current critical `discussions of race, gender, class, and literature.-- Molly Brodsky, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A collection of 14 essays by Walker (Jubilee, 1966; Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius, 1987) that serves as both a powerful social history and as a serious study of black American literature. Born into a family of teachers and ministers, Walker was fortunate to have met and been influenced by the poet Langston Hughes while still in high school. It was his influence, she says, and her family's emphasis on education, that convinced her to continue writing despite the odds against a southern black woman. Her association with Richard Wright in Chicago and her work with the WPA provided the practical experience and instilled the political consciousness that permeates her work. The first batch of essays, here particularly ""Growing Out of Shadow"" and ""Willing To Pay the Price,"" deal with those early years. The emotion-packed ""How I Told My Child About Race"" is a rambling but potent lesson on how to pass on the history without the bitterness and hatred. And the title piece, ""How I Wrote Jubilee,"" is an interesting look at the birth and growth of a novel; it is also the story of Walker's search for her roots. The second section of essays, although primarily literary, nevertheless are revealing on a personal level. ""Rediscovering Black Women Writers in the Mecca of the New Negro"" and ""The Humanistic Tradition of Afro-American Literature"" clearly express Walker's preference for the intellectual and compassionate in black literature as opposed to the more strident and confrontational. Walker tidily sums up her career--well-represented by these essays dating from the 1940's through the 1980's--by writing ""All I have ever written or desire to write is motivated by the fact that I am a Negro living in America. . .As a writer, however, my commitment has to be to the one thing I can do best, and that is to the business of writing. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
