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A searing new novel that reimagines the remarkable, tragic, little-known life of Bert Williams (1874?1922), the first black entertainer in the United States to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune.
Knopf
September 2005
Featuring: Bert Williams
224 pages ISBN: 1400043964 Hardcover
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Contemporary
A searing new novel that reimagines the remarkable, tragic,
little-known life of Bert Williams (1874—1922), the first
black entertainer in the United States to reach the highest
levels of fame and fortune. Even as an eleven-year-old child living in Southern
California in the late 1800s–his family had recently
emigrated from the Bahamas–Bert Williams understood that he
had to “learn the role that America had set aside for him.”
At the age of twenty-two, after years of struggling for
success on the stage, he made the radical decision to do
his own “impersonation of a negro”: he donned blackface
makeup and played the “coon” as a character. Behind this
mask, he became a Broadway headliner, starring in the
Ziegfeld Follies for eight years and leading his own
musical theater company–as influential a comedian as
Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and W. C. Fields.
Williams was a man of great intelligence, elegance, and
dignity, but the barriers he broke down onstage continued
to bear heavily on his personal life, and the
contradictions between the man he was and the character he
played were increasingly irreconcilable for him. W. C.
Fields called him “the funniest man I ever saw, and the
saddest man I ever knew,” and it is this dichotomy at
Williams’s core that Caryl Phillips illuminates in a richly
nuanced, brilliantly written narrative. The story of a single life, Dancing in the Dark is also a
novel about the tragedies of race and identity, and the
perils of self-invention, that have long plagued American
culture. Powerfully emotional and moving, it is Caryl
Phillips’s most accomplished novel yet.
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