Forgotten Readers

“Forgotten Readers focuses upon an aspect of African American culture that was extraordinarily significant in the development of its literary tradition and in its political and social development as well, but one that, as Elizabeth McHenry notes, has been ignored or simplistically described. This book will be instrumental in challenging and changing some erroneous notions about African American history and literature specifically, and American culture in general.”-Frances Smith Foster, Emory University

“Elizabeth McHenry’s Forgotten Readers is a seminal study of the pivotal role that literary societies played in the shaping of African American culture in the nineteenth century. While many scholars knew of the existence of these societies, most of us had presumed their records to be lost or nonexistent. Through meticulous research, McHenry has managed to reconstruct the nature and function of these curious arenas of literary culture in splendid detail. The study is a major contribution to the history of literacy in the African American community. No scholar or student can understand nineteenth-century African American literary history without reading this book.”-Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

“This book is for all those people who thought book clubs began with Oprah.”

- Karla Holloway (News & Observer)

"Forgotten Readers is that rare breed of book that both opens new avenues of scholarship and that your mother . . . will want to devour and then discuss with her mother and friends. . . . Like my best friend’s cooking or a can’t-put-it-down novel, Forgotten Readers leaves me both satisfied and wanting more. . . . McHenry brings African American literary studies into an exciting conversation about the inter-relation between writing, reading, authorship and publishing. Forgotten Readers is a signal contribution to nineteenth-century literary history, as enjoyable as it is important."

- Gabrielle Foreman (Women's Review of Books)

"Forgotten Readers shows that the African-American literary past that we tend to think of as recently rediscovered has been lost and found more than once. . . . Forgotten Readers makes the point that so much emphasis has been placed on the importance of oral culture in black life that we forget how much learning to read and write meant to black people, how they longed to appear as themselves in American literature."

- Darryl Pinckney (New York Review of Books)