Trumpeting a Fiery Sound History and Folklore in Margaret Walker's Jubilee

When twenty-seven-year-old Margaret Walker's first collection of poems, For My People, won the Yale Poets Award in 1942, she was just beginning her long and distinguished career as a poet, novelist, biographer, and teacher. When her novel Jubileewas published to great acclaim in 1966, the New York Review of Bookssaid, "[It] chronicles the triumph of a free spirit over many kinds of bondages." Jubileeis noteworthy for being one of the first novels to present African American history from both a black and female perspective. It is a historical and fictional account of Walker's great-grandmother's life, from slavery through Reconstruction, as told to Walker by her maternal grandmother. In Trumpeting a Fiery Sound, Jacqueline Miller Carmichael examines the novel's genesis and composition, the process of revision and publication, the work's structure and narrative strategies, its use of history and folklore, and its critical reception in the three decades since its first publication.Carmichael, Jacqueline Miller is the author of 'Trumpeting a Fiery Sound History and Folklore in Margaret Walker's Jubilee', published 2003 under ISBN 9780820325750 and ISBN 0820325759.