Works
After meeting Africans in Paris while studying at the Sorbonne in 1926, Graham composed the musical score and libretto of Tom Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro (1932), an opera. She used music, dance and the book to express the story of Africans' journey to the North American colonies, through slavery and to freedom. It premiered in Cleveland, Ohio. The opera attracted 10,000 people to its premier at the Cleveland Stadium and 15,000 to the second performance.
According to the Oxford Companion to African-American Literature, her theatre works included Deep Rivers (1939), a musical; It's Morning (1940), a one-act tragedy about a slave mother who contemplates infanticide; I Gotta Home (1940), a one-act drama; Track Thirteen (1940), a comedy for radio and her only published play; Elijah's Raven (1941), a three-act comedy; and Dust to Earth (1941), a three-act tragedy.
Because of the difficulty in getting musicals or plays produced and published, Graham turned to literature. She wrote in a variety of genres, specializing from the 1950s in biographies of leading African-American and world figures for young readers. She wanted to increase the number of books available for students in elementary school that dealt with notable African Americans. Because of her personal knowledge of her subjects, her books on Paul Robeson and Kwame Nkrumah are considered especially interesting. Other subjects included Frederick Douglas, Phylis Wheatley, and Booker T. Washington; as well as Gamal Abdul Nasser, and Julius Nyerere.
Her late novel Zulu Heart (1974) included sympathetic portrayals of whites in South Africa during a time of conflict with Africans.
Selections from her correspondence with her husband (both before and after their relationship began) appear in the three volume collection edited by Herbert Aptheker, Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois (1976). Graham Du Bois is the subject of the biography, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (2000), by Gerald Horne.
Read more about this topic: Shirley Graham Du Bois
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“I know no subject more elevating, more amazing, more ready to the poetical enthusiasm, the philosophical reflection, and the moral sentiment than the works of nature. Where can we meet such variety, such beauty, such magnificence?”
—James Thomson (1700–1748)
“Evil is something you recognise immediately you see it: it works through charm.”
—Brian Masters (b. 1939)
“Again we mistook a little rocky islet seen through the “drisk,” with some taller bare trunks or stumps on it, for the steamer with its smoke-pipes, but as it had not changed its position after half an hour, we were undeceived. So much do the works of man resemble the works of nature. A moose might mistake a steamer for a floating isle, and not be scared till he heard its puffing or its whistle.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)