Publisher's Synopsis
"This edition of The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois is the first to be arranged and dedicated in accordance with Du Bois's manuscript notes. The Great Barrington Edition opens, as he intended, with the story of his birth and childhood in a small western Massachusetts town. It begins with these words: "I was born by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills, five years after the Emancipation Proclamation which began the freeing of American Negro Slaves." Du Bois was born in the town where Berkshire Publishing Group is located. His autobiography tells the story of a little boy, the only Black boy in his school, who became the first African American PhD at Harvard, an educator, editor, and activist, and a writer of expressive, lyrical, and accessible prose. Our rearrangement of the chapters was made after we found a copy of the marked-up original manuscript for the book in the archives at the University of Massachusetts Amhers
