Explore Quotes by Darryl Pinckney

History is a sly boots, and for a generation of blacks that cannot identify with the frustrations of Jim Crow, and for whites who cannot understand the hard deal that faces working-class blacks, it is difficult to reconcile Hughes's reputation as a poet-hero with his topical verse and uncomplicated prose.

A few of Ellison's short stories from the 1940s and 1950s were widely anthologized over the years. After a while, it became generally known that he was at work on another novel. Though he remained aware ever afterward of the authority 'Invisible Man' gave to him, no second novel followed his brilliant debut in 1952.

Whatever was said about Ralph Ellison, 'Invisible Man' was considered untouchable.

'Invisible Man' holds such an honored place in African-American literature that Ralph Ellison didn't have to write anything else to break bread with the remembered dead. But he did try to go on, because if a writer has done one great thing, then the pressures to do another are intense.

Slave narratives had their greatest influence on public opinion and on literature in the U.S. between 1830 and 1860. After Reconstruction's defeat, their urgency of tone was replaced by the softer one of reminiscence.

After Reconstruction, black newspapers evolved from being a propaganda arm into a kind of opposition press, because even the friends of former slaves had their fears.

Race pride, socialist ideals, and a sincerity as exalted as that of Carlyle's visionaries coalesced in Asa Philip Randolph.

'Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto' is a surprise and a fresh way of looking at Harlem, connecting the black district with the architecture of its historical past.

New York's various undergrounds can make for a disciplined apprenticeship, and Gaga takes pride in her earliest fan base of art, fashion and music students.

Novels set in distant places give us expectations not unlike those we have of travel writing, and often the distinctions are blurred, as in, say, the way the low life of Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward is depicted in John David Morley's recent 'Pictures from the Water Trade.'

Harlem exists in retrospect, in the memory of grandparents or elderly cousins, those 'old-timers' ever ready with their geysers of remembered scenes. The legends of 'Black Mecca' are preserved in the glossy musicals of Times Square and in texts of virtually every kind.

For a long time, Nella Larsen was the mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance. In the late 1920s, she published two sophisticated novels, 'Quicksand' and 'Passing,' and then her writing life came to an end. She died in obscurity in 1964.

I'd waste a holiday trying to set a story in this new place I'd visit, whereas I would never write a story about Indianapolis.

In the years after World War I, blacks began to migrate to the North and its imagined freedoms in great numbers - 'Russian' came to mean a black who had rushed from the South.

When I was in high school, I looked for the black presence in a British historical tradition - before too much slavery and empire - that would not cost me my self-respect.

I grew up in Indianapolis, Ind., then a conservative, provincial city. Anglophilia was the first foreign language I was exposed to. Or maybe it was a way of one-upping the local white people. Or maybe it was an early manifestation of homohood.

Steven Spielberg's 'The Color Purple' might as well have been about a bunch of dancing eggplants for all it has to say about black history.

Ellison was prominent on the lecture circuit even in the Black Aesthetic days of the Sixties when his defiantly pro-American and prickly-proud intellectual act met with some hostility.

The demise of Reconstruction had made it hard for blacks to acquire capital or to pass on property to their children. As blacks were driven from all but the most limited spheres of business and political life, the prestige of the professional rose in the black community.

That slave narratives existed at all implied a satisfactory conclusion to the journey - the attainment of literacy, the escape to the place where one could reflect on the experience of bondage and the flight to freedom, and, in the early days of the slave trade, the conversion to Christianity.

I was a slow and lazy reader as a kid. 'The Prince and the Pauper' was the only non-school book I would read, over and over, between television, records and radio, until I picked up my aunt's copy of 'In Cold Blood' and she didn't ask for it back.