New African American Literature Anthology is Finding Academic and General Audiences
It came as a surprise to Dr. Linda Reed, a history professor at the
University of Houston, that her students began asking about the newly
published Norton Anthology of Africa n American Literature months
before she or their other professors began assigning it in class. The
students, according to Reed, were already buying the anthology off the
shelves of local bookstores before Reed had finished evaluating it as a
text for her course on African American history and culture.
“I had just gotten the book from the publisher only a few weeks before my students started telling me about it,” Reed says.
This fall, Reed is using the anthology to teach “African American
History and Culture in the Twentieth Century” to more than forty
students who enrolled in the class. She says many of the texts, such as
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” are
important historical documents and other literature, such as plays and
song lyrics, help her teach lessons about African American culture.
By conventional publishing industry standards the Norton Anthology
of African American Literature has already achieved stunning success in
attracting a broad general audience. Published just last December, the
2,665-page anthology has gone through four printings – an impressive
mark for a book largely intended for the academic market. Dr. Henry
Louis Gates Jr. and Dr. Nellie McKay served as the text’s general
editors.
Ironically, despite its commercial splash, the criteria for the
anthology’s ultimate success will rest not on how well the public likes
it, but rather on whether it finds wide acceptance among teachers and
students of African American studies at colleges and universities.
Already, in what is the start of the first full school year for the
book, the anthology is exceeding sales expectations with teachers
adopting it for use in their courses.
At the end of August, the W.W. Norton Company, the anthology’s New
York-based publisher, reported the anthology had generated some 371
course adoptions by American college and university faculty for the
current school year. Julia Reidhead, W.W. Norton vice-president and
in-house editor of the anthology, says academic sales have exceeded
more than 10,000. Instructors ordered on average twenty to forty
anthology copies for their classes. The largest adoption of the text
was an order for 400 copies for a single course, according to Reidhead.
