"Sterling A. Brown, poet, essayist, critic, teacher, and raconteur, looms as a pivotal figure in African American letters. His writing established a new vocabulary, one that created a complex portrait of African American lives and a deep knowledge of folk speech and forms. One of his great works, however-a nonfiction study of midcentury black life in the South-was never completed and never published. Brown scholars Tidwell and Sanders have pieced together from extensive archival sources the book Brown envisioned and present it here for the first time." "A Negro Look at the South employs oral history, documentary, reportage, autobiography, vernacular philosophy, ethnography, and literary sketches in order to depict the struggles and strengths of everyday black people. Thus, Brown created a remarkable document of the 1940s and provided an intimate collage of America's persistent geographical and racial divide."--BOOK JACKET.