"Harvard has played a curiously central role in the American cultural imagination, a role that is fraught with ambiguity. In no part of our society is this more the case than in black America. This important book brings together for the first time two hundred years of reflection on the curious relation of black culture to Harvard, and Harvard's complex relation to black people. A fascinating collection, extraordinarily well-researched, an essential text for all who are interested in the history of African-Americans in higher education."
--Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The history of blacks at Harvard mirrors, for better or for worse, the history of blacks in the United States. Harvard, too, has been indelibly scarred by slavery, exclusion, segregation, and other forms of racist oppression. At the same time, the nation's oldest university has also, at various times, stimulated, supported, or allowed itself to be influenced by the various reform movements that have dramatically changed the nature of race relations across the nation. The story of blacks at Harvard is thus inspiring but painful, instructive but ambiguous--a paradoxical episode in the most vexing controversy of American life: the "race question."

The first and only book on its subject, "Blacks at Harvard" is distinguished by the rich variety of its sources. Included in this documentary history are scholarly overviews, poems, short stories, speeches, well-known memoirs by the famous, previously unpublished memoirs by the lesser known, newspaper accounts, letters, official papers of the university, and transcripts of debates. Among Harvard's black alumni and alumnae are such illustrious figures as W.E.B. Du Bois, MonroeTrotter, and Alain Locke; Countee Cullen and Sterling Brown both received graduate degrees. The editors have collected here writings as diverse as those of Booker T. Washington, William Hastie, Malcolm X, and Muriel Snowden to convey the complex ways in which Harvard has affected the thinking of African Americans and the ways, in turn, in which African Americans have influenced the traditions of Harvard and Radcliffe.

Notable among the contributors are significant figures in African American letters: Phyllis Wheatley, William Melvin Kelley, Marita Bonner, James Alan McPherson and Andrea Lee. Equally prominent in the book are some of the nation's leading historians: Carter Woodson, Rayford Logan, John Hope Franklin, and Nathan I. Huggins. A vital sourcebook, Blacks at Harvard is certain to nourish scholarly inquiry into the social and intellectual history of African Americans at elite national institutions and serves as a telling metaphor of this nation's past.

"What exactly constitutes American literature? Harvard professors Marc Shell (OVERDUE; ART AND MONEY) and Werner Sollors (THEORIES OF ETHNICITY; BLACKS AT HARVARD; MULTILINGUAL AMERICA) offer a unique and fascinating twist with THE MULTILINGUAL ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE: A READER OF ORIGINAL TEXTS WITH ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS. They say that American literature doesn't include only material written in English--it includes a Lenape epic, WALAM OLUM; it includes Omar Ibn Said's African-American narrative in Arabic; it includes Victor Sejour's French story "Le Mutatre." Twenty-nine works are here, in languages ranging from Russian and Yiddish to Welsh and Norwegian, along with English translations, reminding us of America's polyglot roots."
--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

An 1830s African-American slave narrative written in Arabic. Dafydd Morgan, the only American immigrant novel published in Welsh. The Native American epic, Walum Olum, in the Lenape language. Theodor Adorno's dream transcripts, in German. A short story about the politics of abortion in working-class Chinatown. "Lesbian Love," a surprisingly explicit chapter from an 1853 New Orleans novel. A haunting 1904 ballad, "The Revenge of the Forests," that is one of the first expressions of radical environmentalism in the United States.

Largely ignored in the debates over canon and multiculturalism in America, indigenous American works written in languages other than English have over time disappeared from view.

The first anthology of its kind, The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature brings together American writings in diverse languages from Arabic and Spanish to Swedish and Yiddish, among others. Presenting eachwork in its original language with facing page translation, the book provides an important complement to all other anthologies of American writing, and will serve to complicate our understanding of what exactly American literature is.

American literature appears here as more than an offshoot of a single mother country, or of many mother countries, but rather as the interaction among diverse linguistic and cultural trajectories.

Consider that Cotton Mather spoke half a dozen languages and wrote in both Spanish and Latin. Or that the first short story known to have been written by an African American (and reproduced here) was written in French. Not only a literature of immigration and assimilation, American multilingual literature participates in the larger literary tradition which too often marginalizes authors who complicate the fit of authorship, citizenship, and language.

View the Table of Contents
;Read the Introduction.

"Thanks again to Werner Sollors for oxygenating our thoughts on race and identity, and their relationship to that holy dunce, the literary imagination. Intelligently multicultural, this compendium provokes and entertains even as it exposes still-live nerves. Sollors' scholarship is erudite but relevant; his choices speak with tactful passion about matters which touch us all."
--Gish Jen, author of "Mona in the Promised Land"

"Many startling textual artifacts included."
--"The New York Times"

"The first in English devoted to work that Mr. Sollors says has typically been overlooked, an orphan literature belonging to no clear ethnic or national tradition."
--"New York Times"

"The scope of this collection is impressive. The introduction is invaluable, providing much-needed context. The volume's topic and scope make it a valuable resource."
--"Choice"

"No one has done more important work to place interracial association at the center of American culture than Werner Sollors. This extraordinarily rich anthology is an excellent addition to the study of this fascinating subject."
--Randall Kennedy, author of "Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity & Adoption"

"Werner Sollors's dazzling collection will enrich our understanding of constructions of race and identity in fresh and provocative ways and will intrigue anyone who cares about literature."
--Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University

"An essential book for those contending with race and literature. With this collection it is clear that race is a category that has been marked both as a boundary that cannot be crossed and as aseparation that is constantly breached. A necessary and crucial contribution."
--Gerald Early, Washington University in St. Louis

"Recommended for academic libraries and for any reader working around the race rubric"
--"Library Journal"

A white knight meets his half-black half-brother in battle. A black hero marries a white woman. A slave mother kills her child by a rapist-master. A white-looking person of partly African ancestry passes for white. A master and a slave change places for a single night. An interracial marriage turns sour. The birth of a child brings a crisis. Such are some of the story lines to be found within the pages of An Anthology of Interracial Literature.

This is the first anthology to explore the literary theme of black-white encounters, of love and family stories that cross--or are crossed by--what came to be considered racial boundaries. The anthology extends from Cleobolus' ancient Greek riddle to tormented encounters in the modern United States, visiting along the way a German medieval chivalric romance, excerpts from "Arabian Nights" and Italian Renaissance novellas, scenes and plays from Spain, Denmark, England, and the United States, as well as essays, autobiographical sketches, and numerous poems. The authors of the selections include some of the great names of world literature interspersed with lesser-known writers. Themes of interracial love and family relations, passing, and the figure of the Mulatto are threaded through the volume.

An Anthology of Interracial Literature allows scholars, students, and general readers to grapple with the extraordinary diversity in world literature. As multi-racial identification becomes more widespreadthe ethnic and cultural roots of world literature takes on new meaning.

Contributors include: Hans Christian Andersen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles W. Chesnutt, Lydia Maria Child, Kate Chopin, Countee Cullen, Caroline Bond Day, Rita Dove, Alexandre Dumas, Olaudah Equiano, Langston Hughes, Victor Hugo, Charles Johnson, Adrienne Kennedy, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Guy de Maupassant, Claude McKay, Eugene O'Neill, Alexander Pushkin, and Jean Toomer.

From the horrors of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia to debates over multiculturalism, ethnicity has, once again, become a global preoccupation. But what exactly do we mean when we speak of ethnicity? And when and how did ethnicity become such an important area of cultural expression and identification that people are ready to die and to kill for it?

Gathering the work of some of our most original thinkers, Theories of Ethnicity provides, in one convenient volume, the most probing and frequently cited considerations of such topics as the melting pot and pluralism, race and race problems, migration and marginality, assimilation and transnationalism, intermarriage, kinship and religion, boundary-construction and maintenance, and the important role of power relations for ethnicity. Contributors include such intellects as Max Weber, Carl Gustav Jung, Margaret Mead, Georg Simmel, Erik Erikson, Karl Mannheim, Fredrik Barth, and Herbert Gans. Theories of Ethnicity grounds much current sociological, cultural, and political research on ethnicity in a theoretical foundation that has heretofore been lacking, providing an important historical base for ongoing and future work on this timely subject.

In Germany, the years immediately following World War II call forward images of obliterated cities, hungry refugees, and ghostly monuments to Nazi crimes. The temptation of despair was hard to resist, and to contemporary observers the road toward democracy in the Western zones of occupation seemed rather uncertain. Drawing on a vast array of American, German, and other sources--diaries, photographs, newspaper articles, government reports, essays, works of fiction, and film--Werner Sollors makes visceral the experiences of defeat and liberation, homelessness and repatriation, concentration camps and denazification. These tales reveal writers, visual artists, and filmmakers as well as common people struggling to express the sheer magnitude of the human catastrophe they witnessed. Some relied on traditional images of suffering and death, on Biblical scenes of the Flood and the Apocalypse. Others shaped the mangled, nightmarish landscape through abstract or surreal forms of art. Still others turned to irony and black humor to cope with the incongruities around them. Questions about guilt and complicity in a totalitarian country were raised by awareness of the Holocaust, making "After Dachau" a new epoch in Western history. The Temptation of Despair is a book about coming to terms with the mid-1940s, the contradictory emotions of a defeated people--sorrow and anger, guilt and pride, despondency and resilience--as well as the ambiguities and paradoxes of Allied victory and occupation.

'A splendidly readable collection that offers an indispensable glimpse into the world experienced by the undistinguished, everyday Americans of the books title a necessary and welcome addition to any research library or course syllabus.' - Timothy A. Hickman, Social History Society

Hamilton Holt, editor of The Independent, collected these touching autobiographies of ordinary people--new immigrants and sharecroppers, cooks and fishermen, women and men working in sweatshops, in the city, and on the land. First published in 1906, and reissued a decade ago, this new edition of Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans is expanded to include lives Holt did not include in his original selection, as well as a new preface by Werner Sollors.

View the Table of Contents
;Read the Introduction.

"Thanks again to Werner Sollors for oxygenating our thoughts on race and identity, and their relationship to that holy dunce, the literary imagination. Intelligently multicultural, this compendium provokes and entertains even as it exposes still-live nerves. Sollors' scholarship is erudite but relevant; his choices speak with tactful passion about matters which touch us all."
--Gish Jen, author of "Mona in the Promised Land"

"Many startling textual artifacts included."
--"The New York Times"

"The first in English devoted to work that Mr. Sollors says has typically been overlooked, an orphan literature belonging to no clear ethnic or national tradition."
--"New York Times"

"The scope of this collection is impressive. The introduction is invaluable, providing much-needed context. The volume's topic and scope make it a valuable resource."
--"Choice"

"No one has done more important work to place interracial association at the center of American culture than Werner Sollors. This extraordinarily rich anthology is an excellent addition to the study of this fascinating subject."
--Randall Kennedy, author of "Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity & Adoption"

"Werner Sollors's dazzling collection will enrich our understanding of constructions of race and identity in fresh and provocative ways and will intrigue anyone who cares about literature."
--Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University

"An essential book for those contending with race and literature. With this collection it is clear that race is a category that has been marked both as a boundary that cannot be crossed and as aseparation that is constantly breached. A necessary and crucial contribution."
--Gerald Early, Washington University in St. Louis

"Recommended for academic libraries and for any reader working around the race rubric"
--"Library Journal"

A white knight meets his half-black half-brother in battle. A black hero marries a white woman. A slave mother kills her child by a rapist-master. A white-looking person of partly African ancestry passes for white. A master and a slave change places for a single night. An interracial marriage turns sour. The birth of a child brings a crisis. Such are some of the story lines to be found within the pages of An Anthology of Interracial Literature.

This is the first anthology to explore the literary theme of black-white encounters, of love and family stories that cross--or are crossed by--what came to be considered racial boundaries. The anthology extends from Cleobolus' ancient Greek riddle to tormented encounters in the modern United States, visiting along the way a German medieval chivalric romance, excerpts from "Arabian Nights" and Italian Renaissance novellas, scenes and plays from Spain, Denmark, England, and the United States, as well as essays, autobiographical sketches, and numerous poems. The authors of the selections include some of the great names of world literature interspersed with lesser-known writers. Themes of interracial love and family relations, passing, and the figure of the Mulatto are threaded through the volume.

An Anthology of Interracial Literature allows scholars, students, and general readers to grapple with the extraordinary diversity in world literature. As multi-racial identification becomes more widespreadthe ethnic and cultural roots of world literature takes on new meaning.

Contributors include: Hans Christian Andersen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles W. Chesnutt, Lydia Maria Child, Kate Chopin, Countee Cullen, Caroline Bond Day, Rita Dove, Alexandre Dumas, Olaudah Equiano, Langston Hughes, Victor Hugo, Charles Johnson, Adrienne Kennedy, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Guy de Maupassant, Claude McKay, Eugene O'Neill, Alexander Pushkin, and Jean Toomer.

Interracialism, or marriage between members of different races, has formed, torn apart, defined and divided the American nation since its earliest history. This volume explores the primary texts of interracialism as a means of addressing core issues in American racial identity. Ranging from Hannah Arendt to George Schuyler and from Pace v. Alabama to Loving v. Virginia, it provides extraordinary resources for faculty and students in English, American and Ethnic Studies, as well as for general readers interested in race relations.

aThis volume is invaluable and provides essential source as wake-up call for both professionals and general audiences to recognize that American literature is multilingual throughout its history and, if present demographic trends continue, will rapidly become more multicultural.a
--"Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development"Aside from the occasional controversy over "Official English" campaigns, language remains the blind spot in the debate over multiculturalism. Considering its status as a nation of non-English speaking aborigines and of immigrants with many languages, America exhibits a curious tunnel vision about cultural and literary forms that are not in English. How then have non-English speaking Americans written about their experiences in this country? And what can we learn-about America, immigration and ethnicity-from them?

Arguing that multilingualism is perhaps the most important form of diversity, Multilingual America calls attention to-and seeks to correct-the linguistic parochialism that has defined American literary study. By bringing together essays on important works by, among others, Yiddish, Chinese American, German American, Italian American, Norwegian American, and Spanish American writers, Werner Sollors here presents a fuller view of multilingualism as a historical phenomenon and as an ongoing way of life. At a time when we are just beginning to understand the profound effects of language acquisition on the development of the brain, Multilingual America forces us to broaden what in fact constitutes American literature.

"Harvard has played a curiously central role in the American cultural imagination, a role that is fraught with ambiguity. In no part of our society is this more the case than in black America. This important book brings together for the first time two hundred years of reflection on the curious relation of black culture to Harvard, and Harvard's complex relation to black people. A fascinating collection, extraordinarily well-researched, an essential text for all who are interested in the history of African-Americans in higher education."
--Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The history of blacks at Harvard mirrors, for better or for worse, the history of blacks in the United States. Harvard, too, has been indelibly scarred by slavery, exclusion, segregation, and other forms of racist oppression. At the same time, the nation's oldest university has also, at various times, stimulated, supported, or allowed itself to be influenced by the various reform movements that have dramatically changed the nature of race relations across the nation. The story of blacks at Harvard is thus inspiring but painful, instructive but ambiguous--a paradoxical episode in the most vexing controversy of American life: the "race question."

The first and only book on its subject, "Blacks at Harvard" is distinguished by the rich variety of its sources. Included in this documentary history are scholarly overviews, poems, short stories, speeches, well-known memoirs by the famous, previously unpublished memoirs by the lesser known, newspaper accounts, letters, official papers of the university, and transcripts of debates. Among Harvard's black alumni and alumnae are such illustrious figures as W.E.B. Du Bois, MonroeTrotter, and Alain Locke; Countee Cullen and Sterling Brown both received graduate degrees. The editors have collected here writings as diverse as those of Booker T. Washington, William Hastie, Malcolm X, and Muriel Snowden to convey the complex ways in which Harvard has affected the thinking of African Americans and the ways, in turn, in which African Americans have influenced the traditions of Harvard and Radcliffe.

Notable among the contributors are significant figures in African American letters: Phyllis Wheatley, William Melvin Kelley, Marita Bonner, James Alan McPherson and Andrea Lee. Equally prominent in the book are some of the nation's leading historians: Carter Woodson, Rayford Logan, John Hope Franklin, and Nathan I. Huggins. A vital sourcebook, Blacks at Harvard is certain to nourish scholarly inquiry into the social and intellectual history of African Americans at elite national institutions and serves as a telling metaphor of this nation's past.

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history.
Published posthumously in 1968, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois is his last and most complete autobiography. Covering his life over almost a century of living in America, it's the closest thing we have to a true autobiography of this important scholar and activist. The book, broken up into three parts, delves into the 90-year-old Du Bois's thoughts on everything from his relationship with sex to his storied association with the NAACP to his political persecution during the Cold War years to his many travels abroad. As Du Bois writes, he takes the reader on a journey to "view my life as frankly and fully as I can." With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an introduction by Werner Sollors, this edition is essential for anyone interested in African American history.

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history.
Published posthumously in 1968, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois is his last and most complete autobiography. Covering his life over almost a century of living in America, it's the closest thing we have to a true autobiography of this important scholar and activist. The book, broken up into three parts, delves into the 90-year-old Du Bois's thoughts on everything from his relationship with sex to his storied association with the NAACP to his political persecution during the Cold War years to his many travels abroad. As Du Bois writes, he takes the reader on a journey to "view my life as frankly and fully as I can." With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an introduction by Werner Sollors, this edition is essential for anyone interested in African American history.

Interracialism, or marriage between members of different races, has formed, torn apart, defined and divided the American nation since its earliest history. This volume explores the primary texts of interracialism as a means of addressing core issues in American racial identity. Ranging from Hannah Arendt to George Schuyler and from Pace v. Alabama to Loving v. Virginia, it provides extraordinary resources for faculty and students in English, American and Ethnic Studies, as well as for general readers interested in race relations.

"What exactly constitutes American literature? Harvard professors Marc Shell (OVERDUE; ART AND MONEY) and Werner Sollors (THEORIES OF ETHNICITY; BLACKS AT HARVARD; MULTILINGUAL AMERICA) offer a unique and fascinating twist with THE MULTILINGUAL ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE: A READER OF ORIGINAL TEXTS WITH ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS. They say that American literature doesn't include only material written in English--it includes a Lenape epic, WALAM OLUM; it includes Omar Ibn Said's African-American narrative in Arabic; it includes Victor Sejour's French story "Le Mutatre." Twenty-nine works are here, in languages ranging from Russian and Yiddish to Welsh and Norwegian, along with English translations, reminding us of America's polyglot roots."
--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

An 1830s African-American slave narrative written in Arabic. Dafydd Morgan, the only American immigrant novel published in Welsh. The Native American epic, Walum Olum, in the Lenape language. Theodor Adorno's dream transcripts, in German. A short story about the politics of abortion in working-class Chinatown. "Lesbian Love," a surprisingly explicit chapter from an 1853 New Orleans novel. A haunting 1904 ballad, "The Revenge of the Forests," that is one of the first expressions of radical environmentalism in the United States.

Largely ignored in the debates over canon and multiculturalism in America, indigenous American works written in languages other than English have over time disappeared from view.

The first anthology of its kind, The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature brings together American writings in diverse languages from Arabic and Spanish to Swedish and Yiddish, among others. Presenting eachwork in its original language with facing page translation, the book provides an important complement to all other anthologies of American writing, and will serve to complicate our understanding of what exactly American literature is.

American literature appears here as more than an offshoot of a single mother country, or of many mother countries, but rather as the interaction among diverse linguistic and cultural trajectories.

Consider that Cotton Mather spoke half a dozen languages and wrote in both Spanish and Latin. Or that the first short story known to have been written by an African American (and reproduced here) was written in French. Not only a literature of immigration and assimilation, American multilingual literature participates in the larger literary tradition which too often marginalizes authors who complicate the fit of authorship, citizenship, and language.

In Neither Black Nor White Yet Both, Werner Sollors has conducted a wide ranging study of interracial literature, both European and American, that casts in proper perspective both past attitudes regarding miscengentation, the construction of these attitudes in culture, as well as tracing historical literary constraints surrounding representations of these themes.

America is a nation making itself up as it goes along-a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nation's many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what "Made in America" means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric-cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape. The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood's American Gothic, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new.

This important new collection of interdisciplinary essays sets out to chart the cultural construction of "ethnicity" as embodied in American ethnic literature. Looking at a diverse set of texts, the contributors place the subject in broad historical and dynamic contexts, focusing on the larger systems within which ethnic distinctions emerge and obtain recognition. It provides a new critical framework for understanding not only ethnic literature, but also the underlying psychological, historical, social, and cultural forces. Table of Contents: On the Fourth of July in Sitka, IshmaelReed. Introduction: The Invention of Ethnicity, Werner Sollors. An American Writer, Richard Rodriguez. A Plea for Fictional Histories and Old-Time "Jewesses," Alide Cagidemetrio. Ethnicity as Festive Culture: Nineteenth-Century German-America on Parade, Kathleen Conzen. Defining the Race, 1890-1930, Judith Stein. Anzia Yezierska and the Making of an Ethnic American Self, Mary Dearborn. Deviant Girls and Dissatisfied Women: A Sociologist's Tale, Carla Cappeti. Ethnic Trilogies: A Genealogical and Generational Poetics, William Boelhower. Blood in the Market Place: The Business of Family in the Godfather Narratives, Thomas Ferraro. Comping for Count Basie, Albert Murray. Is Ethnicity Obsolete, Ishmael Reed, Andrew Hope, Shawn Wong, and Bob Callahan.

Nothing is "pure" in America, and, indeed, the rich ethnic mix that constitutes our society accounts for much of its amazing vitality. Werner Sollors's new book takes a wide-ranging look at the role of "ethnicity" in American literature and what that literature has said--and continues to say--about our diverse culture. Ethnic consciousness, he contends, is a constituent feature of modernism, not modernism's antithesis.
Discussing works from every period of American history, Sollors focuses particularly on the tension between "descent" and "consent"--between the concern for one's racial, ethnic, and familial heritage and the conflicting desire to choose one's own destiny, even if that choice goes against one's heritage. Some of the stories Sollors examines are retellings of the biblical Exodus--stories in which Americans of the most diverse origins have painted their own histories as an escape from bondage or a search for a new Canaan. Other stories are "American-made" tales of melting-pot romance, which may either triumph in intermarriage, accompanied by new world symphonies, or end with the lovers' death. Still other stories concern voyages of self-discovery in which the hero attempts to steer a perilous course between stubborn traditionalism and total assimilation. And then there are the generational sagas, in which, as if by magic, the third generation emerges as the fulfillment of their forebears' dream.
Citing examples that range from the writings of Cotton Mather to Liquid Sky (a "post-punk" science fiction film directed by a Russian emigre), Sollors shows how the creators of American culture have generally been attracted to what is most new and modern.
A provocative and original look at "ethnicity" in American literature

.Covers stories from all periods of our nation's history
.Relates ethnic literature to the principle of literary modernism
."Grave and hilarious, tender and merciless...The book performs a public service."-Quentin Anderson"

When a murder takes place in Dawson s Landing, Missouri, the lives of twin Italian noblemen, the courageous slave Roxy, her 1/32nd black son who has been raised white, and a failing lawyer with an intense interest in the science of fingerprinting become tangled. The unsolved riddle at the heart of Pudd nhead Wilson" is less the identity of the murderer than it is the question of whether nature or nurture makes the man. In his introduction, Werner Sollors illuminates the complex web of uncertainty that is the switched-and-doubled-identity world of Twain s novel. This edition follows the text of the 1899 De Luxe edition and for the first time reprints all the E. W. Kemble illustrations that accompanied it.

Since 1959 The John Harvard Library has been instrumental in publishing essential American writings in authoritative editions."

In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States moved from the periphery to the center of global cultural production. At the same time, technologies of dissemination evolved rapidly, and versions of modernism emerged as dominant art forms. How did African American, European immigrant, and other minority writers take part in these developments that also transformed the United States, giving it an increasingly multicultural self-awareness? This book attempts to address this question in a series of innovative and engaging close readings of major texts by Gertrude Stein, Mary Antin, Jean Toomer, O. E. Rolvaag, Nathan Asch, Henry Roth, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Pietro di Donato, Jerre Mangione, John Hersey, and Leo Szilard, as well as briefer examinations of many other authors and works, against the background of international political developments, the rise of modernism in the visual arts, and the ascendancy of Ernest Hemingway as a model for prose writers.

In many of Werner Sollors's sensitive readings, single sentences and paragraphs serve as the representative formal units of prose works, while throughout "Ethnic Modernism" the trolley (now a cute-seeming object of nostalgia) emerges with surprising frequency as a central thematic emblem of modernity.

Werner Sollors' African American Writing takes a fresh look at what used to be called "Negro literature." The essays collected here, ranging in topic from Gustavus Vassa/Olaudah Equiano to LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, and in time from the Enlightenment to the Obama presidency, take a literary approach to black writing and present writers as readers and as intellectuals who were or are open to the world. From W.E.B. Du Bois commenting on Richard Wagner and Elvis Presley, to Zora Neale Hurston attacking Brown v. Board of Ed. in a segregationist newspaper, to Charles Chesnutt's effigy darkened for the black heritage postage stamp, Sollors alternates between close readings and broader cultural contextualizations to delineate the various aesthetic modes and intellectual exchanges that shaped a series of striking literary works. Readers will make often-surprising discoveries in the authors' writing and in their encounters and dialogues with others. The essays, accompanied by Winold Reiss's pastels, Carl Van Vechten's photographs, and other portraits, attempt to honor this important literature's achievement, heterogeneity, and creativity.

Why can a "white" woman give birth to a "black" baby, while a "black" woman can never give birth to a "white" baby in the United States? What makes racial "passing" so different from social mobility? Why are interracial and incestuous relations often confused or conflated in literature, making "miscegenation" appear as if it were incest? Werner Sollors examines these questions and others in Neither Black nor White yet Both, a fully researched investigation of literary works that, in the past, have been read more for a black-white contrast of "either-or" than for an interracial realm of "neither, nor, both, and in-between". From the origins of the term "race" to the cultural sources of the "Tragic Mulatto", and from the calculus of color to the retellings of various plots, Sollors examines what we know about race, analyzing recurrent motifs in scientific and legal works as well as in fiction, drama, and poetry.