"LOOK AT US, AND KNOW US AND YOU WILL KNOW YOURSELVES": FIRST EDITION OF RICHARD WRIGHT'S 12 MILLION BLACK VOICES, WITH PHOTOGRAVURES OF WORK BY WALKER EVANS AND DOROTHEA LANGE

WRIGHT, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices. A Folk History of the Negro in the United States. New York: Viking, 1941. Quarto, original tan cloth, original photographic dust jacket.

First edition, with text by Richard Wright, featuring over 85 black-and-white photogravures from the landmark photographic unit of the FSA—memorable images by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Ben Shan and others—"some of the best and most ambitious photographers" of the 1930s (Parr & Badger). An exceptional copy in the original dust jacket featuring Walker Evans' FSA photograph, "Flood Refugees, Alabama."

"In July 1940, mere weeks after Native Son had exploded into print, Wright began a collaboration with Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographer Rosskam that resulted in the publication of 12 Million Black Voices… within months of James Agee's and Walker Evans' iconic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." This daring and innovative photobook—featuring Wright's text and over 85 powerful images from photographs by Walker Evans, Ben Shan, Dorothea Lange and Wright himself—is divided into "four sections tracing the arc of black experience: abduction from Africa, the Middle Passage, and slavery in the early Republic; the hardening plantation system, westward expansion, war and Reconstruction; the Great Migration and urbanization… [and] specifically addresses the history of black Americans" (Blair, Harlem Crossroads, 73-93). At once intensely personal and far-reaching, it sparked a "literary debate that was to shape the subsequent African American literature" (Wright: Documented Chronology, 8). Here Wright sets black experience at the core of the American experience: "We black folk, our history and our present being, are a mirror of all the manifold experiences of America. What we want, what we represent, what we endure is what America is" (146: emphasis in original). The "photographic unit of the FSA has come to epitomize documentary photography. This is not only because some of the best and most ambitious photographers worked for it, including Evans, Lange, Shan and Russell Lee, or because they produced some of the most iconic images of the decade… It is also because… the archive of the unit provided the illustrations for a wide range of publications" (Parr & Badger I:121-22). In addition to the dust jacket's photograph by Walker Evans, 12 Million Black Voices includes seven images by Lange and three by Shahn, as well as work by the FSA's most notable photographers, in particular Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Marion Post and John Vachon. With "First Published in October 1941" on copyright page.

Interior fresh with occasional trace of marginal dampstainining; lightest edge-wear to elusive unrestored dust jacket. A handsome copy, rare in this condition.