Oct 18, 2016 | 1072 Pages
“Albert Murray’s best nonfiction has been gathered in a plump and welcome volume from the Library of America. . . . His writing about racism can prickle your skin. . . . To paraphrase Murray’s praise of Ellison’s Invisible Man, reading this book is like watching someone take a 12-bar blues song and score it for a full orchestra.” — Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“Murray — renaissance man, blues philosopher, resolute non-victim — was almost criminally overlooked in the previous century. Perhaps this was because he was constitutionally incapable of suffering fools of any complexion and insisted on pointing out the most elemental truths: ‘The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multicolored people,’ Murray notes in his masterpiece, The Omni-Americans. We are in desperate need of such lucidity. If the arc of the intellectual universe also bends towards justice, then the Library of America’s canonization will resituate Murray alongside contemporaries James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison.” —New York Magazine “100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century”
