Negroland
Regular price
€17.50
'Jefferson's eye for details yields some devastatingly honest and painful insights' The Times
'Captivating... Charm is this book's watchword' Colin Grant, Guardian
The daughter of a successful paediatrician and a fashionable socialite, Margo Jefferson spent her childhood among Chicago's black elite. She calls this society 'Negroland': 'a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty'. With privilege came expectation.
Reckoning with the limits and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments - the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of post-racial America - Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions.
Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.
'Negroland is a sharp-eyed cultural commentary on an era of America that has often been too simply told' Aminatta Forna, Guardian
'Jefferson writes with piercing clarity of a childhood which was full of love and opportunity at home, but also saturated by contradictions, confusions and a racism which corrodes, like rust, to the heart's core' Observer
'Utterly compelling... a remarkable achievement' Sunday Times
The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, MARGO JEFFERSON writes for the Guardian, Vogue and The New York Times, among other publications. Her recent memoir, Negroland, was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir, and was serialised on BBC Radio 4's 'Book of the Week'. She is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.