Brief description:
Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters, professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies, and director of the Center for Humanities at Washington University. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the editor of several volumes, including This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s; The Sammy Davis Jr. Reader; Body Language: Writers on Sport; Speech and Power; Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation; and My Soul's High Song: The Collected Works of Countee Cullen, as well as the author of The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, which won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism; One Nation Under a Groove: Motown and American Culture; Daughters: On Family and Fatherhood; and Tuxedo Junction.
Review Quotes:
"A multifaceted portrait of the man known to all as 'The Greatest.'" - Washington Post
"He is the very spirit of the 20th Century." - Norman Mailer
"Poignant... dead on... some of the best writings on Ali." - Chicago Tribune
"The Muhammad Ali Reader presents a compendium of the finest writing and shows how epic events and an epic subject can prompt epic writing." - American Bookseller