High Cotton
A Novel
ISBN10: 0312420226
ISBN13: 9780312420222
Trade Paperback
320 Pages
$19.00
No one sat me down and told me I was a Negro. That was something I figured out on the sly . . .
So begins acclaimed critic and novelist Darryl Pinckney’s debut novel, High Cotton, an elegant and insightful look into the world of upper-middle-class black elite, or, in a term popularized by W. E. B. Du Bois, “the talented tenth.” The story follows an unnamed narrator as he moves from his safe childhood in conservative Indianapolis to a brief tenure as minister of information for a local radical organization, to eventually settling into the life as an expatriate in Paris. Through it all, his imagination is increasingly dominated by his elderly African American relations and the lessons of their experiences in the “Old Country” of the South.
Challenging the traditional form of the novel in its use of both fiction and autobiography, High Cotton, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, signaled the arrival of a powerful literary force in American letters.
Reviews
Praise for High Cotton
“Deals with questions of color in a way far removed from the apocalypse of James Baldwin and the anger of Richard Wright.”—Chicago Tribune
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
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ONE
THE NEW NEGRO
No one sat me down and told me I was a Negro. That was something I figured out on the sly, late in my childhood career as a snoop, like discovering that babies didn’t...