A pianist on the cover of the Weary Blues

The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes

The epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including Send-to-Kindle.


As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send-to-Kindle program. A great feature of the Send-to-Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send-to-Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.

If you or your students want to download directly from this website to an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.

Download mobi file here.

Here is an excerpt from the cover flap of a recent print edition. On a personal note, I found that the students in my Writing through Literature classes, enjoyed the poetry of Langston Hughes a great deal. I liked his politics in his protest poems, and the beauty of his visual images in many other poems.

The cover flap with a slight updating.
NEARLY A HUNDRED YEARS AFTER ITS FIRST PUBLICATION,, this edition of The Weary Blues reminds us of the stunning achievement of Langston Hughes, who was just twenty-four at its first appearance. Beginning with the opening “Proem” (prologue poem)—”I am a Negro: / Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa”—Hughes spoke directly, intimately, and powerfully of the experiences of African Americans at a time when their voices were newly being heard in our literature. As the legendary Carl Van Vechten wrote in a brief introduction to the original 1926 edition, “His cabaret songs throb with the true jazz rhythm; his sea-pieces ache with a calm, melancholy lyricism; he cries bitterly from the heart of his race … Always, however, his stanzas are subjective, personal,” and, he concludes, they are the expression of “an essentially sensitive and subtly illusive nature.” That illusive nature darts among these early lines and begins to reveal itself, with precocious confidence and clarity.

Cover of Caroling Dusk

Caroling Dusk An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets of the Twenties

The epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including Send-to-Kindle.

If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to  an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file  in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.

Download mobi file here.

Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets is a 1927 poetry anthology that was edited by Countee Cullen. It has been republished at least three times, in 1955, 1974, and 1995 and included works by thirty-eight African American poets, including Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, and Claude McKay. The anthology also includes biographical sketches of the poets whose work is included in the book.

From the original publisher’s description:
“In editing ‘Caroling Dusk,’ an anthology of verse by Negro poets, Countee Cullen has assembled a timely and interesting collection which, even in this day of many anthologies, can show a definitive reason for existing. Not only does this book allow for more than the casual appreciation generally provided by an anthology, but it assembles in one volume much splendid verse not heretofore contained in any compilation. Beginning with Paul Laurence Dunbar, this anthology gives vivid and characteristic selections from the work of poets of established reputation, such as James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Claude McKay, and, finally, Langston Hughes, whose naive and mordant genius has recently been so universally acclaimed.”

Photo of James Weldon Johnson

The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson

Epub or Mobi?
The epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices and in one case for Amazon devices. As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send to Kindle program. A great feature of the Send to Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send to Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.

So if you are using this ebook on Apple, or Android devices, or in the Send to Kindle program, you can download this epub file below.

If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.

From Reviewers on Goodreads:

I have to admit, for a good while I had no idea that this was a novel. It is so convincing as an “autobiography” that I believed this to be Johnson’s own story. Some of it is, from what I glean off the back cover blurb. Whatever the case, it is a book that is immediately engrossing; a remarkably evocative time capsule that whisks and immerses the reader into the world of early 20th-century America…

…The book is a vibrant and fulsomely descriptive evocation of black American life in the early 20th century and is at the same time an exuberant celebration of black culture and of the often unremarked contributions to the world of black Americans and their ancestors.

The novel is honest, flavorful and lovingly rendered, and even with all that has come to pass it remains relevant.

I loved nearly every word of it.

********

This is a book where a lot of things happen one right after the other and yet it didn’t strike me as episodic. It flowed very naturally. Overall, I’m very happy to have read this classic and would recommend highly to everyone. The curiosity and amusement which led to my picking up the book was anthropological in nature but I also ended up just enjoying a very good and interesting story. This really is an outstanding book.

********

James Weldon Johnson wrote two autobiographies, this fictional one of a character referred to only as the Ex-Colored Man, which he published anonymously in 1912, and Along This Way, relating his own remarkable life and career, published only four years before his tragic death in 1938, when the car he was riding in, driven by his wife, was hit by a train.

The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man is his most famous book and it recounts the life of a biracial man born in a small town in Georgia just after the Civil War. He benefits from his black mother’s nurturing and guidance, his absent white father’s financial support of them both, and his innate intelligence and musical abilities. His discovery at school that he is not white shocks him and casts a shadow over his future. He can “pass” for white, however, and the main theme of the book is his struggle over whether to identify as white or black.

Johnson was born in 1871 in Jacksonville, Florida; unlike the Ex-Colored Man, who planned to attend Atlanta University but never did, he graduated from there in 1894. Among other achievements are his admission to the Florida State Bar in 1897 as the first African-American to do so since Reconstruction, successful Broadway music career with his brother Rosamond, service as U.S. Consul to Puerto Cabello, Venezuela and Corinto, Nicaragua, appointment as first executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and career as professor of literature at Fisk University in Nashville and New York University.

I highly recommend this book and plan to read Johnson’s own autobiography, as well. I have to give a shout out to James K. White, whose narration of the free LibriVox audiobook I listened to was outstanding. (Here is the audiobook.)

Cover of A Long Way From Home

A Long Way From Home by Claude McKay

The epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including Send-to-Kindle.


As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send-to-Kindle program. A great feature of the Send-to-Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send-to-Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.

If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.

Download mobi file here.

Claude McKay’s long odyssey from Jamaica to Harlem, Europe, North Africa, Russia, and back to America is chronicled in this autobiography of the most militant writers to emerge from the New Negro movement following World War I. Whether in the intellectual circles of Harlem and Greenwich Village, the docks of Marseilles, or the inner circles of post-revolutionary Russia, McKay’s contact with such figures as Frank Harris, Max Eastman, George Bernard Shaw, W.E.B Dubois, James Weldon Johnson, Charles Chaplin, H.G Wells, Sinclair Lewis, Trotsky, and Radek all served to advance those views which would be so widely accepted in the 1960—Black Pride, self-determination, and the necessity for Black culture to define itself. Source: Amazon.


From Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_McKay

Festus Claudius “Claude” McKay OJ (September 15, 1890[1] – May 22, 1948) was a Jamaican-American writer and poet. He was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Born in Jamaica, McKay first travelled to the United States to attend college, and encountered W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk which stimulated McKay’s interest in political involvement. He moved to New York City in 1914 and, in 1919, he wrote “If We Must Die”, one of his best known works, a widely reprinted sonnet responding to the wave of white-on-black race riots and lynchings following the conclusion of the First World War.

A poet from the first, he also wrote five novels and a novella: Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller that won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature; Banjo (1929); Banana Bottom (1933); Romance in Marseille (written in 1933, published in 2020), a novella, Harlem Glory (written in 1938-1940, published in 1990), and Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem (written in 1941, published in 2017).

Besides these novels and four published collections of poetry, McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932); two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and My Green Hills of Jamaica (published posthumously in 1979); and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), consisting of eleven essays on the contemporary social and political history of Harlem and Manhattan, concerned especially with political, social and labor organizing. His 1922 poetry collection, Harlem Shadows, was among the first books published during the Harlem Renaissance and his novel Home To Harlem was a watershed contribution to its fiction. His Selected Poems was published posthumously, in 1953. His Complete Poems (2004) includes almost ninety pages of poetry written between 1923 and the late 1940s, most of it previously unpublished, a crucial addition to his poetic oeuvre.

McKay was introduced to British Fabian socialism in his teens by his elder brother and tutor Uriah Theodore, and after moving to the United States in his early 20s encountered the American socialist left in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and through his membership in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) — the only American left-labor organization of the era that was totally open to Negro members (as he comments), continuing the tradition of the populist People’s Party of the previous generation. In the course of the teens he became acquainted with the writings of Marx and the programs of a variety of activists. As a co-editor of The Liberator magazine, he came into conflict with its hard-line Leninist doctrinaire editor Mike Gold, a contention which contributed to his leaving the magazine. In 1922–1923, he traveled to the Soviet Union to attend a Congress of the International, there encountering his friend Liberator publisher Max Eastman, a delegate to the Congress. In Russia, McKay was widely feted by the Communist Party. While there, he worked with a Russian writer to produce two books which were published in Russian, The Negroes of America (1923), a critical examination of American black-white racism from a Marxist class-conflict perspective, and Trial By Lynching (1925); translations of these books back into English appeared in 1979 and 1977 respectively; McKay’s original English texts are apparently lost. In the Soviet Union, McKay eventually concluded that, as he says of a character in Harlem Glory, he “saw what he was shown.” Realizing that he was being manipulated and used by the Party apparatus, and responding critically to the authoritarian bent of the Soviet regime, he left for Western Europe in 1923, first for Hamburg, then Paris, then the South of France, Barcelona and Morocco.

After his return to Harlem in 1934, he found himself in frequent contention with the Stalinist New York City Communist Party which sought to dominate the left politics and writing community of the decade. His prose masterpiece, A Long Way From Home, was attacked in the New York City press on doctrinaire Stalinist grounds. This conflict is reflected in Harlem: Negro Metropolis and satirized in Amiable With Big Teeth. His sonnet sequence, “The Cycle,” published posthumously in the Complete Poems, deals at length with McKay’s confrontation with the left political machine of the time. Increasingly ill in the mid-40s, he was rescued from extremely impoverished circumstances by a Catholic Worker friend and installed in a communal living situation; later in the decade, he converted to Catholicism.

See more about Claude McKay at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_McKay

Cover of Home to Harlem

Home to Harlem by Claude McKay

The epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including Send-to-Kindle.

As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send-to-Kindle program. A great feature of the Send-to-Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send-to-Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.

If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.

Download mobi file here.



From Goodreads:

“Claude McKay’s book home to Harlem is depictive of entertainment fun and harships of life growing up black in america during the 1920s. As communities and families struggle to survive while keeping up with turbulent political changes,the author hopes and dreams of unity among his people. A classic with themes of romance friendships class and racial identity.”

Another reviewer in Goodreads:
“I really enjoyed this book. It really transported me back to Harlem in the 1920s. Through the lives of young unskilled African-Americans living and working in Harlem.
“The clothes, the food, entertainment and while sporadic; the political views.
“All in all a great quick read, no surprise that this book was a best seller in its time.”
Finally, the last reviewer:
“McKay’s Home to Harlem is, without a doubt, an under-appreciated classic of the Harlem Renaissance. While it lacks the fame of something like Their Eyes Were Watching GodHome to Harlem is a vital chronicle of the lives of low status blacks in the cultural Mecca of 1920s Harlem. McKay’s protagonist, Jake, is, in some ways, the ideal representation of the common man of Harlem. Instead of living a life of privilege, Jake sponges off women, holds odd jobs, and generally shows himself to be a non-contributor to society. In stark contrast to many protagonists of Harlem Renaissance literature, Jake is neither rural nor well to do. This rarity makes Home to Harlem a fascinating novel. The most lasting contribution of McKay’s novel is the way in which it portrays Harlem. There is a meaningful and visible difference between white life and black life, a divide that, when explored in literature, is nearly always interesting. Not only do McKay’s characters speak, presumably, as blacks did during this time, but they also act in a way that, for better or worse, shows the perceived exoticism of Harlem. While Du Bois’–in my view, wrongly–criticized Home to Harlem for presenting a negative image of American blacks, that is one of the novel’s strongest points: McKay creates characters who act as their real life analogues would. They don’t always represent their race well, they do drugs, they drink, they fight, they fornicate. This novel, not intended as some sort of anthropological exercise to convince whites of the similarity of blacks, paints Harlem as the thrilling, lively, vibrant place that it was. As a result, whether you find McKay stylistically strong or not–he is–, Home to Harlem works brilliantly as, basically, an educational novel, enlightening readers and showing them the amazing place that Harlem is and was.”
the book cover of the Black Napoleon by Percy Waxman

The Black Napoleon: The Story of Toussaint Loverture by Percy Waxman

The epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including Send-to-Kindle.

As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send-to-Kindle program. A great feature of the Send-to-Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send-to-Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.

If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive or Libby on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.

Toussaint Louverture is a favorite hero in English. French, and American literature because the true story of his life is the essence of pure romance. Slave, leader of slaves, military genius, self-made Governor General of the free black republic of San Domingo, victim of Napoleon’s treachery, leader and guiding spirit of those slaves who for the first and only time in history won their own freedom from serfdom without the aid of the whites, Toussaint Louverture was perhaps the most extraordinary Negro who ever lived. A favorite hero in English, French and American romantic literature, the true story of his life is the very essence of pure romance.

The author has caught in direct and exciting prose the story of San Domingo, where the Spaniards wiped out the natives, the French outfought the Spaniards, and Creole luxury demoralized the French: where later the pure black Toussaint Louverture, self-styled son of an African chieftain, routed the Spanish, English, French and mulattoes, and shaped an army that even¬tually drove Napoleon’s troops out of the island.

Cover with a sketch of Carson

Sea and Earth: The Life of Rachel Carson

Download in epub format for Chromebooks, and Apple devices:


Download for Kindle Fires or other Amazon devices:

This is the story of the most important science writer of the 20th century. With “Silent Spring” Rachel Carson shocked Americans into reevaluating the man-made chemicals that have polluted our whole environment. Carson “jolted the entire country into awareness of the problem” of pesticides.” Her book “launched the environmental movement; provoked the passage of the Clean Air Act…the Clean Water Act…and led to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency.”

By drawing much of his story from the recollections of Rachel Carson’s friends and colleagues, the author presents a well-rounded portrait of a woman who was a dedicated scientist and gifted writer, a devoted daughter and friend, and above all, a determined defender of the natural world she understood so well.

This biography won the Christopher Award in 1971 which is presented to the producers, directors, and writers of books, motion pictures and television specials that “affirm the highest values of the human spirit”. It is given by The Christophers, a Christian organization founded in 1945 by the Maryknoll priest James Keller.

cover with photo of Diego Rivera

My Art, My Life, An Autobiography by Diego Rivera

Download in the epub format:


Download for Kindle Fire tablets and Amazon ereaders:

Diego Rivera stands among the titans of our century. A man of phenomenal energy, he not only transformed the art of his country, but helped to transform its social structure as well. In the course of his tempestuous career, he defied presidents, dictators, millionaires, and the arbiters of artistic fashion. Often forced into hiding or exile during his lifetime, he is now enshrined in the pantheon of his country. His activities brought him into personal relationships not only with the artistic and political leaders of Mexico but with the famous and powerful abroad.
Rivera revolutionized modern mural painting and was the principal figure in launching the “Mexican Renaissance,” which is now regarded as one of the great periods in the history of world art.
This was an artist who could not separate his work — always his chief devotion — from his life. Like the man himself, his autobiography is full of conflict and color: the battles which surrounded his murals in the Detroit Art Institute, Rockefeller Center, and the Hotel del Prado are recounted in detail and with fervor.
The absorbing story of this epochal man, drawn from his own words as dictated over a period of ten years to the American journalist, Gladys March, makes a book that is certain to become one of the classics of art literature. With a quality all its own, it contains something of the frankness of Benvenuto Cellini, the impassioned suffering of Van Gogh, and the social vision of Kathe Kollwitz. Illustrated with personal photographs as well as some of Diego Rivera’s greatest works, My Art, My Life will rank among the most important books of recent years.
GLADYS MARCH studied art at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Museum in New York, the Pitti Palace in Florence. the Louvre in Paris, and the Prado in Madrid. She has written columns and features on kings, movie stars, and celebrities from all walks of life. But until she met Diego Rivera in 1945, on a newspaper assignment to interview him, she had never felt the desire to write a hook about any one person. The initial interview led to a ten-year project, during which years the artist dictated his life story to her. Mrs. March’s work was checked by Diego Rivera from time to time up to a few months before his death in 1957. The finished manuscript was read and approved by Emma Hurtado Rivera, the artist’s widow.

Addams and Activists on Deck of Ship on the Way to Europe

Peace and Bread in Time of War by Jane Addams

Download in epub format:


Download in mobi format for Kindle devices:

First published in 1922 during the “Red Scare,” by which time Jane Addams’s pacifist efforts had adversely affected her popularity as an author and social reformer, Peace and Bread in Time of War is Addams’s eighth book and the third to deal with her thoughts on pacifism.

Addams’s unyielding pacifism during the Great War drew criticism from politicians and patriots who deemed her the “most dangerous woman in America.” Even those who had embraced her ideals of social reform condemned her outspoken opposition to U.S. entry into World War I or were ambivalent about her peace platforms. Turning away from the details of the war itself, Addams relies on memory and introspection in this autobiographical portrayal of efforts to secure peace during the Great War. “I found myself so increasingly reluctant to interpret the motives of other people that at length I confined all analysis of motives to my own,” she writes. Using the narrative technique she described in The Long Road of Women’s Memory, an extended musing on the roles of memory and myth in women’s lives, Addams also recalls attacks by the press and defends her political ideals.
Source: Goodreads.

Image of Geronimo

Geronimo by Jim Kjelgaard

Epub or Mobi?

The epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices and in one case for Amazon devices. As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send to Kindle program. A great feature of the Send to Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send to Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.

So if you are using this ebook on Apple, or Android devices, or in the Send to Kindle program, you can download this epub file below.

From reviewers on Goodreads:

A very interesting story. It gave a lot more understanding of Geronimo and the Apaches.

*******

Hurrah for a truly engaging biography that doesn’t hide its subject’s faults, doesn’t engage in hagiography, but DOES present its subject in heroic terms. That’s a hard balance to find, but Kjelgaard did.

His writing is also that perfect blend of vivid storytelling with accurate information on culture and history. AND, even better, there’s plenty of white space; the pacing in the book is a good fit for upper elementary/middle grades readers who aren’t advanced readers (but even advanced readers would enjoy this story). It’s a good introduction to the racial tensions in the 19th century that weren’t slavery related.

I wish this book was easier to find!

*******
Very good primer on Geronimo, one of the last Apache war chiefs. A story of the last days of the free Apache tribes.