Albert Murray ─ Collected Essays & Memoirs: The Omni-Americans / South to a Very Old Place / the Hero and the Blues / Stomping the Blues / the Blue Devils of Nada / F

"The United States is not a nation of black and white people. Any fool can see that white people are not really white, and that black people are not black." This broadside in Albert Murray's first book, The Omni-Americans, published in 1970, announced the arrival of a major new force in American letters, one that stood in defiant opposition to James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and other writers who he believed overstated and even perpetuated the racial divide in American life. Released to mark his centennial in 2016, this Library of America volume brings together The Omni-Americans with five other books in the most complete collection of Murray's groundbreaking nonfiction ever published. One part travelogue and one part memoir, South to a Very Old Place (1971) is a frank report on racial relations in the Deep South amid the turmoil of the Civil Rights movement. The Hero and the Blues (1973) develops Murray's belief that the essential bond shared by both dominant American culture and what he called Negro culture is the shared embrace of a "blues aesthetic" that emphasized creative improvisation. Stomping the Blues (1976) is a vivid history of American jazz and blues music that served as inspiration for the foundation of Jazz at Lincoln Center, established by Murray, Wynton Marsalis, Stanley Crouch, and other enthusiasts in 1987. The volume is rounded out by two later essay collections, The Blue Devils of Nada (1996) and From the Briarpatch Files (2001) which solidified his reputation as a penetrating critic and an always engaging stylist--or, to use the epithet once bestowed on him by volume co-editor Henry Louis Gates Jr., "The King of Cats."

Henry Louis Gates Jr., co-editor, is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy Award–winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Gates has authored or coauthored twenty-one books and created fifteen documentary films. He is the editor of two other volumes in the Library of America series, Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies and, with William L. Andrews, Slave Narratives.

Paul Devlin, co-editor, teaches English at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and has published essays and criticism in many periodicals. He is the editor of Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues (2016) and Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones, as told to Albert Murray (2011), a finalist for the Jazz Journalists Association’s book award.