Dancing in the dark / Caryl Phillips.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Phillips, Caryl

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Williams, Bert, 1874-1922--Fiction.

Williams, Bert.

Williams, Bert, 1874-1922.

African American entertainers--Fiction.

African American entertainers.

African American comedians--Fiction.

African American comedians.

Bahamian Americans--Fiction.

Bahamian Americans.

Entertainers--Fiction.

Entertainers.

Comedians--Fiction.

Comedians.

Genre:

Fiction.

Biographical fiction.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

209 pages ; 22 cm

Edition:

First American edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 2005.

Summary:

A searing new novel that reimagines the remarkable, tragic, little-known life of Bert Williams (1874--1922), the first black entertainer in the United States to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune. Even as an eleven-year-old child living in Southern California in the late 1800s-his family had recently emigrated from the Bahamas-Bert Williams understood that he had to "learn the role that America had set aside for him." At the age of twenty-two, after years of struggling for success on the stage, he made the radical decision to do his own "impersonation of a negro": he donned blackface makeup and played the "coon" as a character. Behind this mask, he became a Broadway headliner, starring in the Ziegfeld Follies for eight years and leading his own musical theater company-as influential a comedian as Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and W. C. Fields. Williams was a man of great intelligence, elegance, and dignity, but the barriers he broke down onstage continued to bear heavily on his personal life, and the contradictions between the man he was and the character he played were increasingly irreconcilable for him. W. C. Fields called him "the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew," and it is this dichotomy at Williams's core that Caryl Phillips illuminates in a richly nuanced, brilliantly written narrative. The story of a single life, "Dancing in the Dark is also a novel about the tragedies of race and identity, and the perils of self-invention, that have long plagued American culture. Powerfully emotional and moving, it is Caryl Phillips's most accomplished novel yet.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy has dustjacket retained.

ISBN:

1400043964

OCLC:

58843330