1236296
9780520228726
"As Dahl sees it, Williams learned early to live in her head. The dark-skinned 5-year-old discovered both intrablack and black-white racism when her family moved from Atlanta to Pittsburgh. Her mother was a party-girl drunk with a slew of children who raised themselves; the family would often teeter on the brink of starvation. When a friend of her stepfather was teaching the 12-year-old Mary Lou to drive, he tried to rape her....At its best, MORNING GLORY pulses with that sort of vignette. Dahl, who previously wrote STORMY WEATHER does not put Williams in a straitjacket of psychopathology or feminism. Instead, she keeps her sense of historical context sharp and probes rather than labels her subject's teeming contradictions."Linda Dahl is the author of 'Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams', published 2001 under ISBN 9780520228726 and ISBN 0520228723.
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