Negroland: A Memoir
By (Author) Margo Jefferson
Granta Books
Granta Books
25th January 2017
29th December 2016
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Autobiography: historical, political and military
History of the Americas
Ethnic studies
973.92092
Short-listed for Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2016
Paperback
256
Width 129mm, Height 198mm, Spine 15mm
197g
The daughter of a successful paediatrician and a fashionable socialite, Margo Jefferson spent her childhood among Chicago's black elite. She calls this society 'Negroland': 'a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty'. With privilege came expectation. Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments - the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of post-racial America - Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions.
The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, MARGO JEFFERSON was for years a theatre and book critic for Newsweek and The New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York magazine, and The New Republic. She is the author of On Michael Jackson and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.