Introduction
The "American Negro," W.E.B. Du Bois writes in the Souls of Black Folk,
ever feels his twoness-an American, a Negro; two souls, two
thoughts, two unreconciled strivings....
The history of the American Negro is the history of this
strife,-this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his
double self into a better and truer self.... He simply wishes to
make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American....
It is always important, then, to remember that African-American
writing is American. The African-American classics gathered
here-Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative, Harriet Jacobs's
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Booker T. Washington's Up
from Slavery, and James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an
Ex-Colored Man-have an American literary and cultural context
without which they cannot be understood. Indeed, as we shall see,
the narratives of self-fashioning that make up this book are
American in their broadest outlines and their minutest details. But
it is, of course, crucial too to recall that they are the writings
of black men and women. In this brief introduction, I should ... read full excerpt from: Early African-American Classics ebook
