Darkwater: The Givens Collection

W.E.B. Du Bois one of the most celebrated intellectuals of the twentieth century published Darkwater -- a powerful collection of essays verse and fiction -- in 1920 two decades after his most famous book The Souls of Black Folk. Throughout his long life and extraordinary career as a scholar activist writer and educator Du Boiss body of work illumined Americas understanding of the problem of the color line. While much of his early texts were sociological investigations of the Black community the author increasingly incorporated autobiographical poetic and spiritual elements into his works. The results are some of the most electrifying commentaries ever written on race and class in America. After decades of obscurity this literary jewel is presented with a new introduction written by David Levering Lewis author of W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race 1868-1919 and W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963; Lewis is the foremost scholar of the work of Du Bois. If The Souls of Black Folk achieved its singular impact through W.E.B. Du Boiss masterly interweaving of the personal and the universal in such a way that each appropriated something of the illustrative and symbolic value of the other much of Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil was a cri de coeur in which the authors anger at the absurdities of racial prejudice crackled through the text like electric jolts that scorched illumined or stunned. -- David Levering Lewis from the Introduction