CARL ROLLYSON
Mr. Rollyson is the author of The Life of William Faulkner and The Last Days of…
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James Baldwin and the Burning Issue of Race
The biography is especially adept at showing how the eloquent, assured Baldwin privately shared the agonies and fears of the major public figures he took on for their retrograde views of race, such as William Faulkner.
The Double Bind of Blackness
Faulkner recognized what W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon wrote about as an everyday reality for themselves and people of color as they protested the color line that equated being Black with inferiority.
The Mengele of Gynecology
J. Marion Sims experimented on slave women because there was nothing that could not be done to them, nothing to prohibit turning their lives into a hell akin to what H.G. Wells imagined in ‘The Island of Dr. Moreau.’
Escaping Slavery Is Not Enough
Ilyon Woo’s tale of the Crafts’ daring decampment has the vigor of a thriller. This biography deserves many of the accolades that it has enjoyed, but it could have been even more powerful.
Slavery From the Inside — as Only a Slave Could Show It
Certain scholars doubted an ex-slave could have written ‘The Bondwoman’s Narrative,’ a novel that channeled Dickens’s ‘Bleak House’ and evinced familiarity with the genres of gothic and sentimental fiction.
Digging Into Black England’s Deeper Past
While looking for a history of Black people in Britain, the author was told by a saleswoman in a bookshop: ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945’ — and so, the need for a book such as this.
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