History At Its Finest: A Review of Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. Du Bois

W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. Du Bois

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

While the history of the American Civil War is quite well known by most Americans thanks to some amazing books and documentaries, the decade-long period immediately following it known as Reconstruction is little known and little understood by most. In fact, thanks to ahistorical mythologies like the “Lost Cause” narrative, Reconstruction has been painted as a dark period when corruption was rampant and Southern state governments, run by Freedmen and Northern carpetbaggers, ran roughshod over people’s rights. The historical record shows that this couldn’t be further from the truth, yet this insidious myth persists. Fortunately, there are also plenty of books that have been written to push back against this narrative and establish the true history of Reconstruction. While many such books have been written in recent years, nearly all of them owe an enormous debt of gratitude to this book, one of the very first systematic histories of the period to tell the story truly. What makes this a must-read for anyone interested in Reconstruction is how W.E.B. Du Bois centers Black Americans in this tale. In this book, Mr. Du Bois makes the strongest case for what has been said by others before: that Black Americans, the enslaved as well as the free, were their own greatest liberators and Reconstruction’s greatest reformers.

While W.E.B Du Bois is best known today as the author of such works as The Soul of Black Folk and one of the founders of the NAACP, he was also the first Black men in America to receive a doctorate from Harvard.  Published in 1935, this book is the culmination of some of Du Bois’s scholarly work, which he had been hitting upon at different times in his scholarly and popular articles decades before.  Starting with an examination of the condition of both enslaved Black people and their White enslavers in the Antebellum South, Du Bois takes his reader on a journey through the 20 year period that encompassed both the Civil War and Reconstruction.  At each step, he shows through critical analysis of the sources available to him at the time how Black Americans’ own actions were what drove many of the key changes of this period.  For example, with so many enslaved Black Americans escaping to Union lines and many of them as well as freedmen from the North eager to join the Union Army, their actions put pressure on Pres. Lincoln and the Union to transform their Civil War objectives from solely from preserving the Union to also pursing abolition.  Du Bois also shows how Black lawmakers during Reconstruction were the prime agents in the creation of the South’s public school system for both white and black kids after the war, a reform that would stay in place long after White Southerns had forcefully and violently suppressed political power.

Du Bois also addresses some of the criticism of this period, particularly the corruption that Black lawmakers were accused of partaking.  While not deny that there were cases of bribery and corruption, Du Bois helps to put it in the context of the time, which was an incredibly corrupt period in American history in general, and shows how oftentimes the corrupt actions of white lawmakers was far greater than anything Black lawmakers did.  Not only that, but Du Bois constantly reminds readers that Reconstruction was an extraordinarily violent time with many atrocities committed against Black Americans.  Racial terror and the undermining of America’s first attempt at multiracial democracy was the goal of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups.  Du Bois makes the argument that the Civil War never really stopped after Appomattox Courthouse, but morphed into a racial war of white supremacists targeting Black Americans.  Indeed, thinking of the racial violence through that lens and using Du Bois’s analysis, Du Bois may not have had the words for it in 1935, but readers who are even casually versed in the history of modern warfare can recognize the resemblance of the Klan’s violent tactics as similar to the Vietcong during the Vietnam War or the Taliban during the war in Afghanistan.  Sadly, as Du Bois shows, the North quickly grew weary of sustaining a military presence in the South and abandoned the project after 1876, a pattern America would follow in Vietnam and Afghanistan using similar arguments (“They got to learn to stand on their own feet eventually”) and having similarly tragic results.  Du Bois analyzes the reasons for the North’s withdrawal in 1876 and shows how it opened the door not just to the end of Reconstruction and Black Americans’s political power for decades, but also how it opens the door to the segregated America that follows soon afterwards.

One weakness of this book though lies in Du Bois’s Marxist background.  By the 1930s, Du Bois was firmly moving in a Marxist direction and he uses Marxist language and thought in his analysis throughout this book.  While this class approach to analyzing the period provides intriguing insights, I do feel as though Du Bois could stretch his Marxist analysis at times.  For example, while an alliance between Black labor and poor White labor in the South could have transformed the history of the period, I have doubts that large numbers of Americans could even conceive of society in such class conscious ways at the time.  Yes, Karl Marx was alive and organizing in Europe at the time and had written The Communist Manifesto in 1848, but his magnum opus, Das Kapital, was published in 1867 and I doubt his ideas had spread quickly enough in America at the time to have any effect.  I could be wrong, but to me Du Bois too often applied a class analysis that Black and White Americans would not have recognized during this period.

Overall, though this book is nearly 90 years old now, Du Bois’s strong analysis and exceptional historical writing provides a gold standard by which all other histories of Reconstruction should be judged.  Library of America has once again done an enormous service to American literary history by publishing this seminal work once again.  I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in American history in general and Reconstruction in particular.

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Another Hidden Gem Worth Picking Up: A Review of the Writings of James Weldon Johnson from the Library of America

James Weldon Johnson: Writings by James Weldon Johnson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have been in love with the Library of America (LOA) for a long time now and there are two main reasons why. First, the uniform book designs are just gorgeous. Put a row of LOA’s books together on your shelf and they are a definite conversation start. On top of that, if you treat them well, these books will last a long time on your shelf long after your other books have yellowed and collected dust. The other reason why I love LOA books is because of their commitment to keeping great works of American literature, both well-known and lesser known, in print in perpetuity. This gives ordinary Americans a chance to discover more obscure, but wonderful, works by authors they may never have heard of, such as Henry Adams’s History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison . This single-volume collection of the writings of James Weldon Johnson is another one of those more obscure gems that LOA has that deserves to better known.

James Weldon Johnson was an African-American polymath at the turn of the century.  He was a writer, an educator, a musical composer, a poet, an early leader of the NAACP, and a diplomat.  Sadly, I knew nothing about him until I picked up this book from LOA not too long ago.  And yet he had an impact on American politics and culture deeper than most people realize.  His novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which is the first work included in this volume, is one of the first works in American literature to deal directly with the issues of colorism and white passing that are now more commonly discussed today.  His musical writing included the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is celebrated even today as the Black national anthem.  As the NAACP’s first executive secretary, he expanded the organizations reach into the South and initiated some of the first lawsuits against the region’s disenfranchisement of Black Americans, though Mr. Johnson would die long before those efforts would come to fruition in Brown v. Board of Education and the major civil rights laws of the 1960s.  And his work as a diplomat enabled him to write with great knowledge and insight on issues such as the U.S. occupation of Haiti (that essay is also included in this volume as well).  In many ways, James Weldon Johnson is a forerunner to both the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movement.

This volume of his works is wonderful.  Along with Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is Mr. Johnson’s own memoirs, which gives an intimate view of his life from his perspective.  Mr. Johnson’s essays are some of this books highlights, particularly his essay on the U.S. occupation of Haiti, which should be more widely read today as Haiti once again descends into political chaos and Americans wonder what, if anything, should be done.  The inclusion of several of Mr. Johnson’s poems and lyrics, including the famous “Lift Every Voice”, is also a treat.  The only weak point in this volume is the inclusion of a couple of chapters Mr. Johnson wrote for a book called Black Manhattan about Black Americans in the theater around the turn of the century.  As a writer of Broadway musicals himself, Mr. Johnson was an expert on the theater and it shows in these excerpts.  However, it is also a very esoteric subject.  Only those with a keen interest in the history of American theater, and especially of Black Americans in the theater, are likely to enjoy this section.

Overall, this another hidden gem within the Library of America’s collection.  This book should be read alongside the works of W.E.B Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and other near contemporary Black authors of the period.  If you have made your way through the works of the Harlem Renaissance, I highly recommend this volume as your next read.

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It's A Start: A Review of the Library of America's first Ernest Hemingway Collection

Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918-1926 by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Library of America is the premier non-profit organization dedicated to preserving America’s literary heritage for all time. Classic American authors from Mark Twain and John Steinbeck to James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston will have their works printed in perpetuity in fine cloth-bound hardcover editions. Having been in business since the 1980s, Library of America has an impressive collection of authors and works, some of which have been out of print for a long time. However, one landmark of the American literary landscape has been conspicuously missing: Ernest Hemingway. This is due to copyright laws that have been guarded zealously by Hemingway’s publisher, but with the recent lapsing of those copyright protections, Library of America has published its first volume of Hemingway’s collected works in this volume. Was it worth the wait?

Hemingway was a powerful writer, but he didn’t become one overnight.  Like many writers, Hemingway had to work to perfect that writing.  This volume collects 8 years of his earliest works including a collection of his newspaper articles for the Toronto Star Weekly and other newspapers.  It also includes the original and an early version of his first short story collection, In Our Time, his “satire” The Torrents of Spring, his first novel The Sun Also Rises, and a selection of his personal letters from this period.  It gives an incredible picture of Hemingway’s raw talent and his progress into the great American author he would become.

Both the journalism and In Our Time short stories are a bit up and down, like any selection of short stories.  A few news articles really stick out such as Hemingway visiting a barbers’ school to get a free shave and a haircut from the students and his first reports on bullfighting in Spain, foreshadowing his lifelong love of the sport.  For his short stories, “Up in Michigan” and “Indian Camp” stand out as well.  But, like any other short story or essay collection I have read, there are just as many misses as there are hits.  Overall, though, they were fascinating.

As for The Torrents of Spring, this is one of the funniest parts of this edition because of its fascinating backstory.  After publishing In Our Time, Hemingway wanted to get out of the contract with his first publisher and switch to a new one, but they needed to reject a novel of his before they could do that.  So, he wrote this “satire” in the hopes that his publisher would do that just that.  And boy is this a doozy of a bad novel as it is incredibly circular with no real narrative and some very odd fourth-wall breaks.  Knowing this background, The Torrents of Spring is good because of just how bad it is.

Then there is The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s first success as a novelist.  What more can be said about this book that has not already been said.  Just like its contemporary The Great Gatsby by Hemingway’s friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Sun Also Rises is very much a Lost Generation novel with its tale of the idle rich, conspicuous consumption, a self-absorbed heroine desired by the main character, and its questioning of masculinity in a post-World War I modern age.  This is one novel that I feel will have greater resonance with me after one or two rereadings, but my reading of this novel is someone slanted due to my slow slog through this book.  So, I shall reserve my judgement of this novel until I have had another chance to read it.

That leaves the final section of this edition, which is a collection of Heminway’s personal letters from this period.  This is perhaps the weakest part of this edition.  While The Torrents of Spring is bad in a good way, Hemingway’s letters are just bad.  Hemingway’s style of writing letters, particularly his earliest letters, is practically incoherent.  Misspellings and grammatical errors abound making these letters almost impossible to understand.  Even when the misspellings become fewer and further between, very few of them ever raise an eyebrow of interest.  Those surrounding the publication of In Our Time, The Torrents of Spring, and The Sun Also Rises are interesting, but the rest are boring or unintelligible.  Library of America typically includes these letters to give a fuller picture of what is going on in the life of the author at that time, but these letters were so uninteresting and with few tidbits about Hemingway’s life that it becomes more a chore than a pleasure to read.  Perhaps hardcore Hemingway fans who know more of about his life will get a kick out of these letters, but I couldn’t do much more than skim them.

Overall, Library of America has started its Hemingway collection very well.  Not everything is a hit here, but then again, few authors ever start their career having perfected their craft.  While the letters section should be skipped by the layman, hardcore Hemingway fans may find them insightful.  I would recommend this book to those hardcore Hemingway fans as well as those who are just looking to take a deeper dive into Hemingway’s early life and works.

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Feminist Literature's Prophet: A Review of Novels & Stories by Zora Neale Hurston (Library of America No. 74)

Zora Neale Hurston : Novels and Stories : Jonah's Gourd Vine / Their Eyes Were Watching God / Moses, Man of the Mountain / Seraph on the Suwanee / Selected Stories by Zora Neale Hurston

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Zora Neale Hurston was an African-American novelist and anthropologist who rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance and wrote the classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Sadly, much of Ms. Hurston’s fictional work were not popular with the public at large until well after her death in 1960. This volume from the Library of America gathers four of her fictional novels and a few of her short stories, including Their Eyes Were Watching God and Moses, Man of the Mountain. Through this collection, one can read the full breadth of Ms. Hurston’s fictional talent and all the good and bad elements of it.

Most of this book’s staggering 1000+ page count is used by her four novels, starting with her first novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine and includes: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Moses, Man of the Mountain; and Seraph on the Suwanee.  The last 100 pages or so consist of her short stories.  When talking about her novels, you cannot skip over Their Eyes Were Watching God.  This now classic tale of female empowerment would prefigure and inspire such African-American novelists as Alice Walker, who would do much to rescue Ms. Hurston’s works from obscurity after her death.  But to me, the most interesting novels in this collection are Moses, Man of the Mountain and Seraph on the Suwanee.  The first is the retelling of the Biblical tale of the Exodus, with a bit of Ms. Hurston’s flare from her previous works thrown in for good measure.  It was a throughly entertaining retelling of an otherwise familiar story.  Seraph is interesting because it was a departure for Ms. Hurston.  Whereas Jonah and Their Eyes, and one could rightfully argue Moses, revolved mostly around black characters, Seraph revolved mostly around white characters.  And yet Ms. Hurston’s fascination with marital relations, which is a common theme throughout almost all of her fictional work, is at the very heart of this book.

In terms of her short stories, the ones that stuck out to me were “John Redding Goes to Sea”, “Spunk”, “The Bone of Contention” and “The Fire and the Cloud”.  I especially enjoyed “The Fire and the Cloud” as it is a short story about Moses, written in the same style as Moses, Man of the Mountain, and sees Moses at the end of his life just before the Israelites are about to enter the promised land.  Thus, its a little addendum to Moses that puts a little bow on that novels ending.

While each of the novels and stories has their own highpoints and drawbacks, one of the most persistent drawbacks of this book is Ms. Hurston’s use of dialect for her characters’ dialogue.  In both Jonah and Their Eyes as well as all but one of her short stories, Ms. Hurston uses dialect for all of her characters' dialogue.  As I understand it, dialect as used by Ms. Hurston and other writers is suppose to make the story and the characters more realistic, but I have always found it difficult to enjoy it.  To me, it just adds an unnecessary layer of complexity to the story and slows down my reading pace (it took me twice as long to finish this book than I had originally planned).  It also seems unnecessary to me as in both Moses and Seraph, Ms. Hurston jettisons the dialect, but is still able to convey her character’s realistic accents without it.  So, if you are not fan of dialect, just know that this book may turn into a bit of a slog, especially at the beginning.

Zora Neale Hurston was a pioneer of black feminist literature in America, even if her contemporary audiences didn’t fully appreciate her talents.  This volume is a worthy inclusion in the Library of America and I highly recommend it to fans of African-American literature in general and specifically the literature of the Harlem Renaissance.

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Necessary Tales: A Review of James Baldwin's Early Novels & Stories

Early Novels & Stories: Go Tell It on the Mountain / Giovanni’s Room / Another Country / Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

James Baldwin is an author whose star has been on the rise once again in recent years as America continues to grapple with race, the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans, and the hypocrisy that can be found within religious communities. In this collection of his earliest novels and short stories, Mr. Baldwin faces all of these issues head on, forcing the reader to grapple with the prejudice of their own country as well as their own.

This collection from the Library of America collects three of Mr. Baldwin’s earliest novels, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and Another Country.  It also includes Mr. Baldwin’s short story collection Going to Meet the Man.  Each of the novels deals some kind of hypocrisy.  At the heart of Go Tell It on the Mountain is the religious hypocrisy embodied Gabriel, who believes himself to be called to be God’s messengers but commits adultery and physically abuses his family.  Giovanni’s Room tells the story of a man who is engaged to be married to an American woman, but lives a double life in Paris with homosexual partner, Giovanni.  And finally, Another Country deals with infidelity, bisexuality, and interracial relationships.  Nearly all of these topics were incredibly taboo when first published and still have the power to shock even today.  

What I find absolutely fascinating about all of these books is that Mr. Baldwin doesn’t shy away from his subjects.  He looks all of them unflinchingly in the eye and forces the reader to do the same as well.  Everyone of these novels is a gripping read, though Another Country does seem to drag for a little too long, especially at the beginning.  The only exception would be the the short story collection Going to Meet the Man.  Like many short story collections, the stories can vary in quality.  The short story “The Man Child” was particularly head scratching.  The first two short stories “The Rockpile” and “The Outing” are interesting because they include the main characters from Go Tell It On the Mountain, but they don’t expand the themes or characters’ stories much beyond that first novel.  The best short story though is the last one, “Going to Meet the Man”, which shines a bright light on the horrors of lynching.  

These novels and short stories are not for the faint of heart, but they are necessary tales even today.  For anyone who is interested in James Baldwin’s novels, this is a great collection to read through.

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