William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the author of this small, paradigm-shifting book, was a brilliant polymath, a pioneering historian and sociologist, a fierce advocate for racial justice, and a towering social philosopher, widely regarded as one of the greatest black geniuses of the modern era. In The Souls of Black Folk, he sought to synthesize the different modes of inquiry that he was trained in-philosophy, history, rhetoric, and sociology-in order to produce a sweeping mural of epic history and local color telling the story of black life in America.

-JESSE MCCARTHY, from the Introduction