Colored People: A Memoir

by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Overview

In a coming-of-age story as enchantingly vivid and ribald as anything Mark Twain or Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recounts his childhood in the mill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, in the 1950s and 1960s and ushers readers into a gossip, of lye-and-mashed-potato “processes,” and of slyly stubborn resistance to the indignities of segregation.
 
A winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Award and the Lillian Smith Prize, Colored People is a pungent and poignant masterpiece of recollection, a work that extends and deepens our sense of African American history even as it entrances us with its bravura storytelling

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679739197
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/11/1995
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	522,795
Product dimensions:	5.24(w) x 7.98(h) x 0.64(d)

About the Author

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. The author of numerous books, including the widely acclaimed memoir Colored People, Professor Gates has also edited several anthologies and is coeditor with Kwame Anthony Appiah of Encarta Africana, an encyclopedia of the African Diaspora. An influential cultural critic, he is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and other publications and is the recipient of many honors, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the National Humanities Medal.

Editorial Reviews

"Affecting, beautifully written and morally complex...The heart of the memoir is Gates' portrait of his family, and its placement in a black society whose strength, richness and self-confidence thrived in the darkness of segregation."—Richard Eder, The Los Angeles Times

"[Colored People] may well become a classic of American memoir."—The Boston Globe

From the Publisher

Noted scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., currently head of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard, offers a memoir of his childhood and youth in the 1950s and '60s.

bn.com

The two preeminent black American scholars address the legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois and community service in a series of brief essays. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The man touted as America's most celebrated black scholar reminisces to his daughters about his boyhood in the polluted, dying Allegheny Mountains' papermill town of Piedmont, West Virginia. Laying out the social and emotional topography of a world shifting from segregation to integration and from colored to Negro to black, Gates evokes a bygone time and place as he moves from his birth in 1949 to 1969, when he goes off to Yale University after a year at West Virginia's Potomac State College. His pensive and sometimes wistful narrative brims with the mysteries and pangs and lifelong aches of growing up, from his encounters with sexuality, to the discovery of intellectual exhilaration as he is marked to excel in school, to his suffering a crippling injury to one of his legs and struggling frightfully for his father's respect. There is much to recommend this book as a story of boyhood, family, segregation, the pre-Civil Rights era, and the era when Civil Rights filtered down from television to local reality. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/94.]-Thomas J. Davis, SUNY at Buffalo

Library Journal