William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, The Quest of the Silver Fleece

Robert W. Williams (Bennett College)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.5: African American Writing and Culture of the United States.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Philathia Bolton (University of Akron), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), J. Michael Duvall (College of Charleston), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), A Yemisi Jimoh (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Tony Papanikolas (San Jose State University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1911

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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Already well known for

The Souls of Black Folk

and other works, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) published

The Quest of the Silver Fleece

in 1911. It was his first novel and became another of the various ways by which he challenged racial discrimination and social injustice over the span of his long career. Du Bois considered

Quest

to represent “The Future of the Negro” – the bibliographic heading under which he classified the novel in his book

The Negro

(1915). In 1940, Du Bois wrote that

Quest

“was really an economic study of some merit” (

Dusk of Dawn

Commentators, both contemporary and later, have noted that Quest is part of a tradition of books that frame everyday human existence in terms of struggles over the production of goods (Braithwaite; Lewis): for example, Frank Norris's

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1660 words

Citation: Williams, Robert W.. "The Quest of the Silver Fleece". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 December 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=28514, accessed 03 May 2024.]

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