Reading the Old Man

"Liberator? Madman? Genius? Martyr? John Brown achieved immediate and lasting notoriety through his attempt to foment an armed insurrection among African American slaves in 1859, an event that many believed hastened the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War." "In this absorbing book, Bruce Ronda examines the representations of Brown chronologically, ranging from Thoreau's "Plea for Captain John Brown" - with its ardent defense of Brown as a patriot, Transcendentalist, and true New Englander - through treatments by anonymous southern writers and well-known authors such as John Greenleaf Whittier, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Frederick Douglass, William Dean Howells, and E. A. Robinson. Ronda then considers the major treatments of Brown in the early to mid-twentieth century by W. E. B. DuBois, Stephen Vincent Benet, and Robert Penn Warren. Of particular interest are discussions of a 1930s poem by Muriel Rukeyser, Truman Nelson's 1960 novel The Surveyor, and artwork by Jacob Lawrence. He concludes with studies of novels by three contemporary authors: Russell Banks, Michelle Cliff, and Bruce Olds."--BOOK JACKET.