Blake; Or, the Huts of America: A Corrected Edition
Martin R. Delany's Blake (1859, 1861-1862) is one of the most important African American--and indeed American--works of fiction of the nineteenth century. It tells the story of Henry Blake's escape from a southern plantation and his subsequent travels across the United States, into Canada, and to Africa and Cuba. His mission is to unite the black populations of the American Atlantic regions, both free and slave, in the struggle for freedom, whether through insurrection or through emigration and the creation of an independent black state. Blake is a rhetorical masterpiece, all the more strange and mysterious for remaining incomplete, breaking off before its final scene.
This edition of Blake, prepared by textual scholar Jerome McGann, offers the first correct printing of the work in book form. It establishes an accurate text, supplies contextual notes and commentaries, and presents an authoritative account of the work's composition and publication history. In a lively introduction, McGann argues that Delany employs the resources of fiction to develop a critical account of the interconnected structure of racist power as it operated throughout the American Atlantic. He likens Blake to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, in its willful determination to transform a living and terrible present. Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Corrected Edition will be used in undergraduate and graduate classes on the history of African American fiction, on the history of the American novel, and on black cultural studies. General readers will welcome as well the first reliable edition of Delany's fiction.Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
Martin Delany (1812-1885) was an abolitionist, writer, soldier, physician, and black nationalist. Born free in Virginia, Delany was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he became a physician's assistant and worked tirelessly during the cholera epidemic of 1833. Admitted to Harvard Medical School in 1850, Delany was dismissed after protests by white students threatened his life. After traveling to the South in 1839 to witness the conditions experienced by slaves for the first time, Delany moved to Rochester, New York to work with Frederick Douglass on his abolitionist newspaper The North Star. After a brief visit to Liberia and several years in Canada, Delany returned to the United States at the onset of the Civil War, eventually working as a recruiter for the United States Colored Troops and serving as the first African American field grade officer in the Army. During Reconstruction, he moved to South Carolina, where he worked for the Freedmen's Bureau and dedicated himself to activism and politics. Delany was also a prolific pamphleteer, journalist, and novelist whose book Blake, or the Huts of America (1859-1862) is considered a pioneering work of black nationalist fiction. Towards the end of his life, Delany devoted himself to the Liberia Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company, an expedition he envisioned as a response to the growing violence and voter suppression faced by African Americans following the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877. In his final years, Delany returned to his work as a physician, supplementing his wife's income as a seamstress in order to pay for their children to attend Wilberforce College in Ohio.
Martin Delany's Blake is a fascinating novel. I've been waiting for a long while for a reliable edition, and Jerome McGann has produced it.--Robert Levine, University of Maryland
An American literary classic most Americans have never heard of...The actual novel itself is unapologetically didactic, its characters mainly acting as mouthpieces for the author's polemics--but those polemics possess a startling directness that makes a 21st-century reading of this fully-restored Blake as arresting as its original readers must have found it.--Steve Donoghue"Christian Science Monitor" (02/20/2017)
McGann has done a painstaking job of recovering the work, providing scrupulous editing, an excellent introduction, and copious notes that will undoubtedly draw added critical attention to the novel...Largely owing to its historical significance, this edition will be of most interest to scholars.--L. J. Parascandola"Library Journal" (02/15/2017)
