In 1850, Delany was among the first three black students admitted to Harvard Medical School, from which they were dismissed weeks after their admission due to student protests. Delany was born in Charles Town, Virginia and raised and in Chambersburg and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. General readers will welcome as well the first reliable edition of Delany’s fiction.Martin Robinson Delany was an African-American abolitionist, journalist, physician, soldier, writer and proponent of black nationalism.
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. He likens Blake to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, in its willful determination to transform a living and terrible present. 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. It establishes an accurate text, supplies contextual notes and commentaries, and presents an authoritative account of the work’s composition and publication history. This edition of Blake, prepared by textual scholar Jerome McGann, offers the first correct printing of the work in book form. Blake is a rhetorical masterpiece, all the more strange and mysterious for remaining incomplete, breaking off before its final scene.
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. 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.
Delany’s Blake (1859, 1861–1862) is one of the most important African American?and indeed American?works of fiction of the nineteenth century.
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