Walls: Essays 1985-1990

Walls: Essays, 1985-1990, Kenneth McClane's first book of autobiographical essays (originally published in 1991), is closely related to his second collection, Color, published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2009. Walls is a powerful and deeply moving meditation on relationships. It begins with an essay on the death of McClane's brother, Paul, which changed everything. Time, my work, everything found a new calculus.

His brother's life and death are present in some way in all the essays that follow A Death in the Family, as McClane tells us about giving a poetry reading in a maximum-security prison; his experience of being one of the first two African American students to attend America's oldest private school; teaching creative writing; his sister, Adrienne; a divestment protest at Cornell; and his encounters with James Baldwin.

McClane has written a new preface to this paperback edition of Walls, in which he reminds us that we are inevitably interconnected: we are each other's witness.

Author: Kenneth McClane
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 09/30/2010
Pages: 122
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.39lbs
Size: 8.48h x 5.50w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9780268035204

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 11/29/2010

About the Author

Kenneth A. McClane is the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of Color: Essays on Race, Family, and History (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), and seven poetry collections.

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