Du Bois, W. E. B. - William E. Cain (essay date Summer 1990)
William E. Cain (essay date Summer 1990)
SOURCE: "W. E. B. Du Bois's Autobiography and the Politics of Literature," in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer, 1990, pp. 299-313.
[Cain is an educator. In the essay below, he focuses on Du Bois's decision to join the Communist Party and leave the United States for Ghana.]
During the course of his long career, W. E. B. Du Bois produced superb work in many genres. His Harvard dissertation The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (1896) was a pioneering, minutely detailed analysis of the growth and eventual elimination of the slave trade to the Unites States; his absorbing rendering of African culture and African-American history The Negro (1915) served as "the Bible of Pan-Africanism"; and his later historical book Black Reconstruction (1935) bitingly challenged the traditional view of the post-Civil-War period as a time of white suffering and...
[The entire page is 5860 words long]
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