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Article: The Black Canon. (Book Reviews).(The Norton Anthology of African -American Literature)
- Article from:
- Kola
- Article date:
- September 22, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Black Writers' Guild. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Four landmark volumes define and describe the best of African-American literature.
I wasn't taught African-American literature at my high school in Jacksonville, N.C., during the mid-'70's. I was never introduced to the rich rhythms of my own people's literary texts. Instead, I had my family stories of slavery and sharecropping, of hand-rowing ferries on North Carolina's rivers and eating turtles. Those mysterious tales moved me to search out the literature rooted in my own culture, to find the works of Phyllis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks.
Now at the close of the 20th century, we finally have "The Norton ...