Paul Robeson - Hardcover

Duberman, Martin Bauml

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0370305752 ISBN 13: 9780370305752

Publisher: London : The Bodley Head, 1989

Synopsis

Worn and torn dust jacket has a faded spine and is in a protective sleeve, marking to page edges . Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

About this title

About the Author

Martin Duberman is Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York and the author of some twenty books, including Charles Francis Adams (winner of the Bancroft Prize). He lives in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly

For millions of white Americans in the 1930s and early '40s, Paul = Robeson's success was a symbol that the American system worked. If this son of an ex-slave, this All-American football hero and concert singer could become a stage and screen starfamous as Othello and the Emperor Jonesthen couldn't any black person rise to the highest echelons through hard work? But when Robeson turned politically active, combining black militancy with support for the Stalinist Soviet Union and his own socialist vision, white Americaand many blacks tooturned their backs on him. The FBI kept him under close surveillance; the State Department restricted his right to travel. By 1960, he was branded as a public enemy, a Soviet apologist, and forced to the sidelines in civil-rights battles. His health and spirit broken, Robeson died in 1976, his reputation in eclipse. This big, engrossing, empathetic biography by distinguished historian-playwright Duberman is a major act of cultural restoration, forcing a fresh confrontation with Robeson's often highly independent political stances as well as his artistic creativity. Relying almost entirely on letters, diaries, interviews, FBI files and other primary sources, Duberman writes about Robeson's sexual affairs with white actresses, his shaky marriage, his deliberate cultivation of the image of "natural" actor and his fear that the U.S. would inherit the colonialist systems of Great Britain and France while its leaders pursued Cold War politics with the U.S.S.R. Photographs. 50,000 first printing.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: London : The Bodley Head
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0370305752
• ISBN 13: 9780370305752
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English