William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, The Quest of the Silver Fleece

Robert W. Williams (Bennett College)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.5: African American Writing and Culture of the United States.
Vol. editors: Philathia Bolton (University of Akron), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), A Yemisi Jimoh (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1911

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Already well known for The Souls of Black Folk and other works, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) published The Quest of the Silver Fleece in 1911. It was his first novel and became another of the various ways by which he challenged racial discrimination and social injustice over the span of his long career. Du Bois considered Quest to represent “The Future of the Negro” – the bibliographic heading under which he classified the novel in his book The Negro (1915). In 1940, Du Bois wrote that Quest “was really an economic study of some merit” (Dusk of Dawn).

Commentators, both contemporary and later, have noted that Quest is part of a tradition of books that …

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1660 words

Citation: Williams, Robert W.. "The Quest of the Silver Fleece". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 December 2009 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=28514, accessed 27 November 2024.]

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