The Black Flame Trilogy: The Ordeal of Mansart; Mansart Builds A School; Worlds of Color.

DU BOIS, W.E.B.

$4,200.00

Item Number: 122355

New York : Mainstream Publishers , 1957-61.

First editions of each of novel in the author’s acclaimed Black Flame trilogy. Octavo, original cloth, three volumes. Association copy, inscribed on the front free endpaper to his close friends and neighbors Thomas and Patricia Bell in volume one. Each are near fine in a very good dust jackets. First editions are uncommon, especially signed.

Du Bois called his epic Black Flame trilogy a fiction of interpretation. It acts as a representative biography of African American history by following one man, Manuel Mansart, from his birth in 1876 until his death. The Black Flame attempts to use this historical fiction of interpretation to recast and revisit the African American experience. The last book in this profound trilogy, Worlds of Color, opens when Mansart is sixty and a successful and established college president. Packed with political intrigue, romance, and social commentary, the book provides a dark, cynical view of the world and its relationship to the "Black Flame," or the potential of black civilization.