Sterling A. Brown – författare

Sterling A. Brown was renowned for his prolific poetry and scholarship on African American folklife. A contemporary of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer and the first poet laureate of the District of Columbia, Brown gained acclaim for blues, jazz, and southern folklore. His celebrated works, including Southern Road, are collages of narrative and dialect unique to Brown's unflinching poetic voice.  Edited by the late distinguished poet Michael S. Harper, this new edition includes a foreword by award-winning poet Cornelius Eady and introductory texts by James Weldon Johnson and Sterling Stuckey. The result is a tour de force by one of the most distinctive poets in American letters.

Excerpt: "The treatment of the Negro in American fiction, since it parallels his treatment in American life, has naturally been noted for injustice. Like other oppressed and exploited minorities, the Negro has been interpreted in a way to justify his exploiters I swear their nature is beyond my comprehension. A strange people!—merry ’mid their misery—laughing through their tears, like the sun shining through the rain. Yet what simple philosophers they! They tread life’s path as if ’twere strewn with roses devoid of thorns, and make the most of life with natures of sunshine and song. Most American readers would take this to refer to the Negro, but it was spoken of the Irish, in a play dealing with one of the most desperate periods of Ireland’s tragic history. The Jew has been treated similarly by his persecutors. The African, and especially the South African native, is now receiving substantially the same treatment as the American Negro. Literature dealing with the peasant and the working-class has, until recently, conformed to a similar pattern."