This long-awaited book from New York Review of Books contributor Darryl Pinckney is a rigorous, wide-ranging, personal history of the relation between black writers and the realist tradition, and the story of one writer's connection to his own literary past. After an introductory memoir-in which the poet Sterling Brown is remembered for challenging a new generation of black writers to learn about black writers in history-Pinckney devotes the first part of Sold and Gone to the achievements of a dozen major authors, including the subversive realism of Charles Chesnutt, the rise of the vernacular in Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston's original uses of the folkloric, and recent turns away from realism by authors as disparate as Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones. The second section considers the great recurring modes and motifs of African American autobiography, from W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells to Malcolm X and John Edgar Wideman. Throughout, Pinckney describes the changing cultural influences on black writers and challenges the notion that any one narrative tradition existed for African Americans. Erudite and approachable, Sold and Gone will change the way we think about what it means to be a black writer in America.
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Darryl Pinckney, a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, has written for the European stage and is the author of a novel, High Cotton (FSG, 1992).
