In 1991, acclaimed poet Kenneth A. McClane published Walls: Essays, 1985-1990, a volume of essays dealing with life in Harlem, the death of his alcoholic brother, and the complexities of being black and middle-class in America. Now, in Color: Essays on Race, Family, and History, McClane contributes further to his self-described "autobiographical sojourn" with a second collection of interconnected essays. In McClane's words, "All concern race, although they, like the human spirit, wildly sweep and yaw." A timely installment in our national narrative, Color is a chronicle of the black middle class, a group rarely written about with sensitivity and charity. In evocative, trenchant, and poetic prose, McClane employs the art of the memoirist to explore the political and the personal. He details the poignant narrative of racial progress as witnessed by his family during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. We learn of his parents' difficult upbringing in Boston, where they confronted much racism; of the struggles they and McClane encountered as they became the first blacks to enter previously all-white institutions, including the oldest independent school in the United States; and of the part his parents played in the civil rights movement, working with Dr. King and others. The book ends with a tender account of his parents in the throes of Alzheimer's disease, which claimed both their lives. "Ken McClane's latest collection proves that he is one of the finest essayists currently plying the trade. Graceful, incisive, humane, Ken's writing is both beautifully wrought and deeply informative about how we live life. All of us practicing essayists can only marvel in delight at his skill and envy his accomplishment. I have known Ken since my days in graduate school over twenty-five years ago and I still feel now as I felt then: when I grow up I want to be half the writer Ken McClane is."―Gerald L. Early, author of The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture and This is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s "Kenneth McClane's voice is unique in American letters: pragmatic; contemplative; intriguingly moody; at times unabashedly and movingly sentimental. He chronicles a world of black people that is little-known and even less-imagined. Color is a wonderful book of beautifully written, understated essays by an important writer who has steadily contributed to American letters."―Elizabeth Alexander, Yale University "Kenneth McClane argues that the inclusion of a jazz phrase in the midst of another obviously discrete modality becomes an act of communion that 'honors the fragile possibility for mutuality.' He is right, for he does this skillfully in Color. An exciting find, the volume is a compendium of sophisticated essays rendered with deceptive simplicity. Color, always insightful, sometimes inexplicably tender, is that rare volume, seldom encountered, that moves us beyond measure."―Mari Evans, author of Continuum: New and Selected Poems and Clarity as Concept: A Poet's Perspective "The essays that comprise Color are mighty in their directed honesty and uncompromising views of the lived racialized world observed with an intellectual curiosity and wise generosity that astonishes on every page. Through it all, the words hum with love, so that even the pained heart sings."―Helena Maria Viramontes, author of Their Dogs Came With Them

Color: Essays on Race, Family, and History (African American Intellectual Heritage)

Biographies & Memoirs

McClane, Kenneth A.

Community & Culture

University of Notre Dame Press

Walls: Essays, 1985-1990, Kenneth McClane's first book of autobiographical essays (originally published in 1991), is closely related to his second collection, Color, published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2009. Walls is a powerful and deeply moving meditation on relationships. It begins with an essay on the death of McClane's brother, Paul, which "changed everything. Time, my work, everything found a new calculus." His brother's life and death are present in some way in all the essays that follow "A Death in the Family," as McClane tells us about giving a poetry reading in a maximum-security prison; his experience of being one of the first two African American students to attend America's oldest private school; teaching creative writing; his sister, Adrienne; a divestment protest at Cornell; and his encounters with James Baldwin. McClane has written a new preface to this paperback edition of Walls. "Walls reminds us of the differences that set us apart, dividing our world into good kids and troublemakers, winners and losers, the beautiful and the damned. The anodyne for exile in these essays is McClane's common but by no means commonplace lexicon, at once evocative and spare, that leads us to painful but honest connection and the luminous possibility of empathy." --William L. Andrews, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "Kenneth McClane's Walls is a collection of exquisitely crafted autobiographical essays that rivals the most profound nonfictional writings of James Baldwin in its skillful investigation of the hidden recesses of the always-throbbing black American soul. Indeed, Walls is a beautifully calibrated exploration of the challenges faced by a courageously self-aware--and refreshingly self-revealing--black intellectual whose journey to and in the American mainstream is both menacing and exhilarating." --Michael Awkward, University of Michigan

Walls: Essays, 1985-1990 (African American Intellectual Heritage)

Arts & Literature

Walls is the first book of essays by Kenneth McClane, considered by many the finest African American poet of his generation. Coming after his sixth published collection of poems, this is a rich personal narrative about a young black man's coming of age in the 1960s and 70s. Beginning with a powerful essay about the death of his alcoholic brother, McClane writes eloquently about the African American experience from a unique perspective. 
Growing up in Harlem with parents who were both professionals, McClane's middle-class background could not protect him from the reality of black life in America. What happened to his family, happened to most black families-prejudice, painful self-deprecation, and even the loss of a child to drugs. 
Like James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son published a generation before, these essays are McClane's attempt to understand life as a prescript to interpreting much of American life. In the title essay-selected for inclusion in the Best American Essays 1988 collection- McClane deftly melds a personal narrative about giving a poetry reading to inmates at Auburn prison with a trenchant analysis of prisons, our need for them, and the terrible cost to the incarcerated. Another essay tells of McClane's disabling experience of being the first black student to attend the oldest private school in America. Another describes his brain-damaged sister and the horrible ways in which society tries to deny her. There is also a brilliant analysis of teaching creative writing, and a powerful reflection on the divestment movement at a major university.
Elegant, passionate, and incisive, these essays speak with the urgency and candor of human witness. Scholars in African American literature and history, students of the essay, and the general reader should find McClane's book essential. No one has written more perceptively about America's failed promise since F.Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby.

Walls: Essays, 1985-1990 (African American Life Series)

Wayne State Univ Pr

Moons and low times

distributed by Small Press Distribution

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