Search results for ""Author Audrey Thomas""

Richard Pryor is an American icon whose name evokes irreverent humor, social critique, and a perplexing degree of self-agonized genius. This anthology captures in one volume the spirit, zest, and cultural impact of Pryor's complex artistry. Audrey Thomas McCluskey has assembled insightful essays from a broad range of scholars, social critics, writers, filmmakers, and other established and emerging commentators on American culture. Although a celebration of Pryor's genius, the book approaches the subject with a critical sensibility that provides insight into his work to reveal how he simultaneously highlighted and embodied prominent narratives of race, gender, and social conditions in America in ways that continue to enlighten and entertain.

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Caricatured by Charles Dickens in Little Dorrit as the cantankerous maid of Mr. and Mrs. Meagles, "Tattycoram" tells her own life story in this utterly compelling metafiction by the celebrated author of Isobel Gunn. Throughout her career, Audrey Thomas has repeatedly challenged her readers to follow her into new territory. In Tattycoram, she does it again, taking readers into the distant fictional world of Charles Dickens's England, where, in an unusual twist, Dickens interacts with his own characters, allowing Thomas to raise questions about the intersection of life and art. In Thomas's hands, Harriet Coram gains both a poignant personal history and a quiet dignity. Abandoned as a baby at the London Foundling Hospital and cared for by a kindly foster mother until the age of five, the young Hattie attracts the attention of the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens, who hires her as the family housemaid. In the Dickens household, Charles's sister Miss Georgina takes an instant dislike to Hattie's pretty looks and trains her caged raven to tease her with the mocking nickname of Tattycoram. Although Hattie escapes from Dickens and his family to care for her dying foster mother in the country, she is later swept back under the famous author's sphere of observation as a teacher in his newly founded school for released female convicts. There she befriends Elizabeth Avis, who also appears as another minor character from Little Dorrit. In typical Dickensian fashion, Hattie meets not one, but two, long-lost brothers and falls in love with the one who conveniently turns out not to be her "real" brother. But first, she must confront her benefactor about his shameless misrepresentation of her and Elizabeth's characters in his latest novel.

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Emerging from the darkness of the slave era and Reconstruction, black activist women Lucy Craft Laney, Mary McLeod Bethune, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and Nannie Helen Burroughs founded schools aimed at liberating African-American youth from disadvantaged futures in the segregated and decidedly unequal South. From the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, these individuals fought discrimination as members of a larger movement of black women who uplifted future generations through a focus on education, social service, and cultural transformation. Born free, but with the shadow of the slave past still implanted in their consciousness, Laney, Bethune, Brown, and Burroughs built off each other’s successes and learned from each other’s struggles as administrators, lecturers, and suffragists. Drawing from the women’s own letters and writings about educational methods and from remembrances of surviving students, Audrey Thomas McCluskey reveals the pivotal significance of this sisterhood’s legacy for later generations and for the institution of education itself.

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"From this documentary portrait, a talented and multifaceted contributor to the black experience in the 20th century United States emerges. Much is owed to Bethune, and readers gain an appreciation of that debt." —ChoiceThis volume explores the multi-faceted career of Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) in her roles as stateswoman, politician, educational leader, and social visionary. It offers a unique combination of original documentary sources and analysis of Bethune's life and work. The more than 70 documents, spanning 53 years of Bethune's public life, include letters, memoranda, position papers, newspaper columns, interviews, and speeches. Essays by the editors relate these documents to the phases of Bethune's career.

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