Boston: Houghton Mifflin (1966)

First Edition.

Very good in dust jacket.

Originally a story passed down verbally through the generations, Margaret Walker draws on thirty years of research to bring to life the true tale of Vyry, a child born of a white plantation owner and his black mistress, into the painful light of our modern times.

Jubilee tells the true story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress. Vyry bears witness to the South’s antebellum opulence and to its brutality, its wartime ruin, and the promises of Reconstruction. Weaving her own family’s oral history with thirty years of research, Margaret Walker’s novel brings the everyday experiences of slaves to light. Jubilee churns with the hunger, the hymns, the struggles, and the very breath of American history.

MARGARET WALKER (1915–1998) was one of America’s most popular and respected African American writers and scholars. Among the most formidable literary voices to emerge in the twentieth century, she will be remembered as one of the foremost transcribers of African American heritage.