Powerful pages - unprecedented public impact of W.W. Norton and Co's Norton Anthology of African American Literature

Black Issues in Higher Education, Sept 18, 1997 by Ronald Roach

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 Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," are important historical documents and other literature, such as plays and song lyrics, help her teach lessons about African American culture.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.

"It's amazing. A lot of people want to teach from the anthology," Reidhead says.

Currently, the popular trade sales of the anthology are still exceeding those sold in the academic market. Although Reidhead would not divulge total sales figures for the anthology, she says the text's first printing, which sold out in February 1997 almost entirely by general market bookstores, was 30,000. Subsequent printings of the book have ranged from 10,000 to 20,000 copies.

Sales from the second, third and fourth printings have been divided between general trade and the academic markets.

McKay, who is professor of African American and American literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says the general market popularity of the book has surprised her more than its promising debut in the academy.

"I think the anthology is being perceived not strictly as a college textbook. It's captured the attention of many outside the academy," McKay says.

Upon its publication last year, the anthology generated considerable excitement in the publishing and academic communities. More than ten years in the making, the long anticipated Norton Anthology was hailed as an achievement for the acknowledgement and acceptance of African American literature. The anthology's publication was seen as a great triumph, especially for Gates, chairman of Afro-American studies at Harvard University, who proposed the idea during the mid-1980s.

Some of the editors, who worked on the project with Gates and McKay, say the project had been a frustrating enterprise because of its complexity.

"It took twice as long as we thought it would," McKay said. "It was exhilarating at times. But, on the other hand, it could be depressing."

Part of the delay was caused by the untimely deaths of two editors at Norton who each had headed the project during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Reidhead inherited responsibility for the anthology in 1993 and guided it to completion.

The Norton literature anthology series in American, British, and other fields are widely used in college and university courses.

The African American volume is the seventh in the Norton series. The academic edition, which is in paperback form, is sent to instructors with a course guide and suggestions on using the anthology in teaching. The general trade edition is published in hardback.

The anthology includes the work of 120 writers, fifty-two of whom are women. The anthology has texts of writings such as The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Jean Toomer's Cane, and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, along with selections from Black writers from eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley to contemporary novelist Walter Mosley.