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 Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," are important historical documents and other literature, such as plays and song lyrics, help her teach lessons about African American culture.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