The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches

London: Archibald Constable & Co, 1905. First British edition. Hardcover. Very good. The first British edition (two years after the American) of one of the Library of Congress's 88 Books that Shaped America: "'Few books make history and fewer still become foundational texts for the movements and struggles of an entire people. The Souls of Black Folk occupies this rare position,' said Du Bois biographer Manning Marable. Du Bois's work was so influential that it is impossible to consider the civil rights movement's roots without first looking to this groundbreaking work."

"It is difficult to comprehend how daring it was for W. E. B. Du Bois to publish the most acclaimed book of his career in the face of this avalanche of beastly labels rushing down onto the Negro. Du Bois stared into the grisly faces of the racist past and present and decreed that blacks were not soulless beasts.... In publishing The Souls of Black Folk, on April 18, 1903, Du Bois argued, implicitly, that the world needs to know the humanity of black folk by listening carefully to the 'striving' in their souls. And we can hear in the book the strivings in the soul of Du Bois as much as we can hear the strivings in the souls of other black folk... Today it still SHOULD BE READ AND STUDIED BY EVERY PERSON."-Ibram X. Kendi, Paris Review

xi, [1], 265, [1] pages, plus an inserted frontispiece portrait of the author with a tissue guard. First UK edition (with no statements of later printings). This is a very attractive copy of Du Bois's landmark work, with a bit of bumping at the spine ends and corners.