The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader

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The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 680 pages. $26.95 paper.

If the quality of a reader or anthology can be determined largely by how teachable it makes the subject that it documents and how accurately it outlines the parameters of that subject, The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, edited by Eric Sundquist, is exemplary. Despite his almost unchallenged prominence as the intellectual patriarch of African American cultural and literary history and his self-conscious desire to "write the history of African American culture," Du Bois has always been a somewhat difficult figure to integrate into literature and cultural studies courses. Much of this difficulty has stemmed from the sheer range of his accomplishments and interests. As Sundquist points out, "Du Bois wrote alternately and equally well as a sociologist, an economist, a political scientist, an educator, an artist, and a civil rights advocate, and more often than not, …