Dimensions
134 x 203 x 34mm
Jubilee tells the true story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress. Vyry bears witness to the South's antebellum opulence and to its brutality, its wartime ruin, and the promises of Reconstruction. Weaving her own family's oral history with thirty years of research, Margaret Walker's novel brings the everyday experiences of slaves to light. Jubilee churns with the hunger, the hymns, the struggles, and the very breath of American history. AUTHOR: Margaret Walker (1915-1998) was one of America's most popular and respected African American writers and scholars. She first gained national recognition with the 1942 poetry collection For My People, a winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award. She was awarded the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for her novel Jubilee, which became a national bestseller. Among the most formidable literary voices to emerge in the twentieth century, she will be remembered as one of the foremost transcribers of African American heritage. SELLING POINTS: ? A best-selling classic. ? Sales of nearly 100,000 copies since 1999. Annual sales of 1,500 print copies. ? Margaret Walker was a professor at Jackson State University, where she founded the Institute for the Study of the History, Life and Culture of Black People in 1968. She served as its director for eleven years, and the centre was later renamed in her honour. REVIEWS: "Chronicles the triumph of a free spirit over many kinds of bondage." ?New York Times Book Review
