"First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1989"--Title page verso.

Hailed in The New York Times Book Review as "eclectic, exciting, convincing, provocative" and in The Washington Post Book World as "brilliantly original," Henry

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s original, groundbreaking study explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black liter

Collected primarily in metropolitan New York and Philadelphia during the classic era of black street poetry (i.e., during the late 1960s and early 1970s) these

Explores the relationship between African and Afro-American vernacular traditions and Black literature