The Souls of Black Folk
Fourteen essays and a short story, published in 1903, about what it was like to be black in America forty years after emancipation. Du Bois writes as a historian, a sociologist and a mourner, and the book moves between statistics, spirituals and personal recollection without warning.
The famous phrase about the colour line is in the foreword, and the famous chapter on double consciousness is early. But the book is not only diagnosis: the chapters on the freedmen's schools and on the sorrow songs are a record of institution-building. Read it alongside Washington's Up from Slavery to see the argument that shaped black political thought for a generation.
Public-domain status
First published in 1903. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; W. E. B. Du Bois died in 1963, so the work enters the public domain there in 2034. Check the law where you live before reusing a modern edition, introduction or translation.
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Keep reading
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