Amiri Bakara's "The Dead Lecturer", First Edition 1964

Amiri Bakara

First Edition

[African American][Black Radicalism] Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Bakara). The Dead Lecturer. New York: Grove Press, 1964. First edition. LeRoi Jones’s second volume of poetry, published just before his transformation into Amiri Baraka and his full embrace of Black nationalism. Octavo. Publisher’s red cloth with gilt spine lettering, in original dust jacket featuring a striking photographic portrait of Jones by Leroy McLucas. Jacket with critical praise comparing Jones’s improvisational style to Ginsberg and jazz musicians, reinforcing his connection to the avant-garde and experimental literary movements of the 1960s. Includes major poems such as Crow Jane and A Poem for Willie Best, which interrogate race, violence, and identity in mid-century America. The Dead Lecturer marks a crucial transition in Jones’s career, blending the Beat-inflected spontaneity of his early work with the sharpened racial consciousness that would define his later writing. Drawing on influences from modernist poetics, jazz improvisation, and the Black radical tradition, these poems reflect Jones’s growing dissatisfaction with white liberalism and his movement toward a more militant Black identity. Jacket shows moderate wear, with toning, light soiling, and a few small chips at spine ends. Interior clean. A significant work in the evolution of Black radical thought, published in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement but foreshadowing the Black Arts Movement that Jones/Baraka would soon spearhead.

Item #21446

Price: $300.00