Poet, critic, scholar, teacher, folklorist, and consummate yarn-spinner, Sterling Brown has been among the most influential and, until recently, one of the most neglected black American writers of the twentieth century. Hailed by everyone from W.E.B. Du Bois to Stokely Carmichael for his contributions to Afro-American culture, Brown is perhaps best known for his depictions of rural black America in poems that are based on such folk forms as blues and spirituals and that incorporate a brilliant use of dialect. His poetic output has not been prolific. Yet, while some have pointed to what Arthur P. Davis has called his "perfectionist tendencies" as an explanation, they fail to take note of the fact that "No Hiding Place," his follow-up to his first book of poetry, Southern Road (1932), was rejected and was not published until his collected poems came out in 1980. Although Brown is often considered a...