Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Corrected Edition

Delany was one of the most prominent blacks in 19th-century America. Born as a freeman, he became a physician and political activist who knew Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and Abraham Lincoln. He wrote several nonfiction works and also the novel Blake, the story of its narrator, Henry Blake, who sought freedom, whether through armed insurrection or through emigration, and the creation of a separate black nation. The novel would become, as editor McGann (John Stewart Bryan Professor of English, Univ. of Virginia; The Poet Edgar Allan Poe) states, "the most important and the least influential work of fiction published by a black writer in the nineteenth century." The novel was largely ignored because it was published serially in two abbreviated versions in obscure periodicals. It was only published as a book in 1970. Now McGann has done a painstaking job of recovering the work, providing scrupulous editing, an excellent introduction, and copious notes that will undoubtedly draw added critical attention to the novel.