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Nellie Y. McKay (1930–2006) was a pivotal figure in contemporary American letters. The author of several books, McKay is best known for coediting the canon-making with Henry Louis Gates Jr., which helped secure a place for the scholarly study of Black writing that had been ignored by white academia. However, there is more to McKay's life and legacy than her literary scholarship. After her passing, new details about McKay's life emerged, surprising everyone who knew her. Why did McKay choose to hide so many details of her past? Shanna Greene Benjamin examines McKay's path through the professoriate to learn about the strategies, sacrifices, and successes of contemporary Black women in the American academy. Benjamin shows that McKay's secrecy was a necessary tactic that a Black, working-class woman had to employ to succeed in the white-dominated space of the American English department. Using extensive archives and personal correspondence, Benjamin brings together McKay’s private life and public work to expand how we think about Black literary history and the place of Black women in American culture.
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Keywords
- African American biography
- African American literature
- African American women--careers and professions
- African American women--higher education
- African Americans--correspondence
- African Americans--intellectual life and history
- Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Biography & True Stories
- Biography: general
- Biography: literary
- Black & Asian studies
- Black students at Harvard
- Black studies at Harvard
- Black Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Black Studies in the Midwest
- Black women and the archives
- Darwin Turner and early black critics
- ethnic studies
- feminist memoir
- Gender studies, gender groups
- Gender studies: women
- Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
- Nell Irvin Painter
- Nellie Y. McKay
- Norton Anthology of African American Literature
- pioneers of Black feminist thought
- Queens College SEEK program
- Social groups
- Society & culture: general
- Society & Social Sciences
- student
- thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DN Biography and non-fiction prose::DNB Biography: general::DNBL Biography: writers
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBS Social groups, communities and identities::JBSF Gender studies, gender groups::JBSF1 Gender studies: women and girls
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBS Social groups, communities and identities::JBSL Ethnic studies
- Toni Morrison
- Zora Neale Hurston
Links
DOI: 10.5149/9781469661902_BenjaminEditions