Dec 16, 2009

Colored People | Colored People

At a glance:

Author: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
First Published: 1994
Type of Work: Memoir
Time of Work: 1950-1970
Setting: Piedmont, West Virginia
Principal Characters: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Henry Louis Gates, Sr., Pauline Augusta Coleman Gates, Rocky Gates, Jim “Nemo” Coleman
Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir
Subjects: African Americans, Civil rights, Segregation or integration, Racism, Race, Guilt
Locales: Piedmont, WV

In the preface to this memoir, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., states his objective explicitly: “As artlessly and honestly as I can, I have tried to evoke a colored world of the fifties, a Negro world of the early sixties, and the advent of a black world of the later sixties, from the point of view of the boy I was.” The artlessness of the book lies in its easy colloquial language (nothing within the text itself reveals the author as an English professor at Harvard University) and its relaxed, digressive movement. Its honesty appears in the portraits not only of individuals (even the...

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Colored People | Colored People

At a glance:

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