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Walls Essays 1985-1990 Kenneth A. McClane

Walls is the first book of essays by Kenneth McClane, considered by many the finest African American poet of his generation. Growing up in Harlem with parents who were both professionals, McClane's middle-class background could not protect him from the reality of black life in America. What happened to his family happened to most families—prejudice, painful self-deprecation, and even the loss of a child to drugs. Like James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son publsihed a generation before, these essays are McClane's attempt to understand life as a prescript to interpreting much of American life. Elegant, passionate, and incisve, these essays speak with the urgency and candor of human witness. No one has written more perceptively about America's failed promise since F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby.

"McClane writes eloquently about the experience of being both African American and middle-class in contemporary America....McClane's essays break new ground in the tradition of African American personal narratives." —CHOICE

African American Life Series $18.95s cloth / ISBN 0-8143-2134-8 122 pages 1991