Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America

(Paperback)

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Description

This book offers a candid revelation of the ideas, values, and attitudes that inform "drylongso" or ordinary black life in America. In writing this book the author, anthropologist, folklorist and humanist, went in search of "Core Black People" - the ordinary men and women who make up black America and asked them to define their culture. Their responses, recorded in this book are to American oral history what blues and jazz are to American music. This book won the first Association Anthropologists Publication Award.

Reviews

"Powerful, eloquent, andI hopedisturbing." Studs Terkel

"This book is terrifying and illuminating. Not since the nineteenth-century slave narratives have so many black Americans told such truths to white America." Maya Angelou

Author Bio

John Langston Gwaltney was a student of Dr. Margaret Mead, before becoming a Professor of Anthropology. He has taught at the State University of New York at Cortland and at the Maxwell Graduate School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He is also a visual artist, with a special interest in ritual carving.