SOURCE: Sanders, Mark A. “The Ballad, the Hero, and the Ride: A Reading of Sterling A. Brown's The Last Ride of Wild Bill.” CLA Journal 38, no. 2 (December 1994): 162-82.

In the following essay, Sanders perceives The Last Ride of Wild Bill as a collection of ballads that focus on the fundamental nature of heroism.

In 1975 one of the most aggressive proponents of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), Broadside Press, published The Last Ride of Wild Bill and Eleven Narrative Poems, Sterling A. Brown's final collection. As he points out in his preface, Dudley Randall had been requesting, for some time, permission from Brown to reissue much of his poetry; Randall was especially concerned that Southern Road was out of print and therefore largely unavailable to a new generation of highly politicized readers. But Brown's sight was on a new configuration of older works—most of them not found in...