SOURCE: "W. E. B. Du Bois's 'Autobiography' and the Politics of Literature," in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer, 1990, pp. 299-313.

In the following essay, Cain discusses W. E. B. Du Bois's political ideology as revealed in his autobiography.

During the course of his long career, W. E. B. Du Bois produced superb work in many genres. His Harvard dissertation The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (1896) was a pioneering, minutely detailed analysis of the growth and eventual elimination of the slave trade to the Unites States; his absorbing rendering of African culture and African-American history The Negro (1915) served as "the Bible of Pan-Africanism" (Rampersad 234); and his later historical book Black Reconstruction (1935) bitingly challenged the traditional view of the post-Civil-War period as a time of white suffering and Negro abuses and abominations. His studies of the black family and community, especially The Philadelphia Negro (1899), remain valuable; his...