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9781598535037

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Albert Murray's best nonfiction has been gathered in a plump and welcome volume from the Library of America. . . . His writing about racism can prickle your skin. . . . To paraphrase Murray's praise of Ellison's Invisible Man, reading this book is like watching someone take a 12-bar blues song and score it for a full orchestra. - Dwight Garner, The New York Times Murray - renaissance man, blues philosopher, resolute non-victim - was almost criminally overlooked in the previous century. Perhaps this was because he was constitutionally incapable of suffering fools of any complexion and insisted on pointing out the most elemental truths: 'The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multicolored people,' Murray notes in his masterpiece, The Omni-Americans. We are in desperate need of such lucidity. If the arc of the intellectual universe also bends towards justice, then the Library of America's canonization will resituate Murray alongside contemporaries James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. -New York Magazine 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century

Albert Murray's best nonfiction has been gathered in a plump and welcome volume from the Library of America. . . . His writing about racism can prickle your skin. . . . To paraphrase Murray's praise of Ellison's <i>Invisible Man</i>, reading this book is like watching someone take a 12-bar blues song and score it for a full orchestra. <b> Dwight Garner, <i>The New York Times</i></b>

Albert Murray's best nonfiction has been gathered in a plump and welcome volume from the Library of America. . . . His writing about racism can prickle your skin. . . . To paraphrase Murray's praise of Ellison's Invisible Man, reading this book is like watching someone take a 12-bar blues song and score it for a full orchestra. -- Dwight Garner, The New York Times Murray -- renaissance man, blues philosopher, resolute non-victim -- was almost criminally overlooked in the previous century. Perhaps this was because he was constitutionally incapable of suffering fools of any complexion and insisted on pointing out the most elemental truths: 'The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multicolored people, ' Murray notes in his masterpiece, The Omni-Americans. We are in desperate need of such lucidity. If the arc of the intellectual universe also bends towards justice, then the Library of America's canonization will resituate Murray alongside contemporaries James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. --New York Magazine 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century

Author Information

Henry Louis Gates Jr., co-editor, is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy Award–winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Gates has authored or coauthored twenty-one books and created fifteen documentary films. He is the editor of two other volumes in the Library of America series, Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies and, with William L. Andrews, Slave Narratives. Paul Devlin, co-editor, teaches English at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and has published essays and criticism in many periodicals. He is the editor of Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues (2016) and Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones, as told to Albert Murray (2011), a finalist for the Jazz Journalists Association’s book award.

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