cover image The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader

The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader

Harold Cruse. Palgrave MacMillan, $19.95 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-312-29396-3

Harold Cruse is best known for 1967's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, an influential call for black autonomy, warning against integration as a strategy. Edited by regular Washington Post contributor William Jelani Cobb, The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader includes essays from the early 1960s on race, bohemianism, James Baldwin and Cuba; three chapters of Crisis, three from Rebellion or Revolution (1968) and further essays and speeches from the Black Power era; one chapter from Plural but Equal (1987) and a selection of other post-Black Power writings that address theater and music. The introduction by cultural critic Stanley Crouch is useful, but a more complete and analytical intellectual biography is still wanted.