![]() ![]() ![]() DuBois, Rampersad was approached by the executor of Langston Hughes’s estate to write a biography of the poet. ![]() And while the historians who had written about him had done good jobs, I believed that they had missed his genuine essence-which is, in my opinion, the grandly poetic imagination he brought to the business of seeing and describing black America and America itself.”Īfter the dissertation was transformed into the magisterial intellectual biography, The Art and Imagination of W. “My life was changed in a basic way by my first reading of The Souls of Black Folk. “I thought that DuBois was extraordinarily important and complex,” he says. Rampersad’s career as a biographer began at Harvard, where he wrote his dissertation on W. “It nevertheless served me well in dealing with the complexities of American biography.” “Growing up as a schoolboy in Trinidad, I received an education in literature that some people might dismiss as ‘colonial,’ ” Arnold Rampersad recalls. It may come as a surprise to some that one of the nation’s premier biographers was born and raised outside the country. ![]()
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