Research Catalog

Title

Amiri Baraka collection of unpublished poetry, 1959-1965.

Author

Baraka, Amiri, 1934-2014.

Supplementary Content

Finding aid

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Baraka, Amiri, 1934-2014.

Description

.4 lin. ft.

Summary

Amiri Baraka's Collection of Unpublished Poetry consists of over two hundred poems, which, according to Baraka, were written between 1959 and 1965. With the exception of three poems, all are unpublished. Most items bear holograph corrections, changes and deletions, and most are short poems of one page in length. Included in the collection is a four-page bibliography compiled by the author containing entries not noted in other publications. Additionally, there is a six-page manuscript entitled "Uncle Tom's Cabin: An Alternate Ending."

Donor/Sponsor

Schomburg NEH Automated Access to Special Collections Project.

Subjects

• Poems
• African American poets
• Poetry > Collections
• Black Arts Movement

Genre/Form

Poems.

Source (note)

• Phoenix Book Shop

Biography (note)

• Imamu Amiri Baraka was a writer whose variety of forms include drama, poetry, music criticism, fiction, autobiography and the essay. As a major and controversial author, his ideas and art - especially, as the primary architect of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960's - have had a profound influence on the direction of subsequent African American literature.

Processing Action (note)

• Accessioned
• Cataloged

Call Number

Sc MG 280

Author

Baraka, Amiri, 1934-2014.

Title

Amiri Baraka collection of unpublished poetry, 1959-1965.

Biography

Imamu Amiri Baraka was a writer whose variety of forms include drama, poetry, music criticism, fiction, autobiography and the essay. As a major and controversial author, his ideas and art - especially, as the primary architect of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960's - have had a profound influence on the direction of subsequent African American literature.

Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey, to working class parents; he attended Rutgers, Howard and Columbia Universities and the New School for Social Research. He taught at several universities and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater School in Harlem in 1964. His literary career began in 1958 when he founded "Yugen" magazine and Totem Press. Although Baraka started publishing in the early 1960's, he did not achieve fame until the 1964 publication of his play "Dutchman," later made into a movie. Other important plays he wrote include "The Slave" (1964) and "Toilet" (1964). A prolific writer, Baraka published two books of poetry, "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note" (1961) and "The Dead Lecturer" (1964). The mid 1960s saw the publication of "The System of Dante's Hell," a novel and "Tales," a collection of short stories. Baraka also wrote a major social-aesthetic study of African-American music "Blues People: Negro Music in White America" (1963).

Baraka's career went through a series of dramatic stages; first were his Beatnik years in the late 1950s through the early 1960s, when this apolitical avant garde writer refused to take action in the world. Then he became a Black cultural nationalist, renouncing the white world in the mid-1960s through mid-1970s, and then to a Marxist-Leninist rejecting monopoly capitalism in the mid-1970s. In 1974, dramatically reversing himself, Baraka rejected Black nationalism as racist and became a Third World Socialist.

Connect to:

Finding aid

Added Author

Baraka, Amiri, 1934-2014.

Added Title

Schomburg NEH Automated Access to Special Collections Project.

Research Call Number

Sc MG 280