Es'kia Mphahlele

Ezekiel Mphahlele

Down Second Avenue

The Wanderers

Helen Moffett

A Poetry Anthology for Southern African Students

Seasons Come to Pass

A Novel of Africa

Chirundu

Es’kia Mphahlele’s seminal memoir of life in apartheid South Africa—available for the first time in Penguin Classics Nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1969, Es’kia Mphahlele is considered the Dean of African Letters and the father of black South African writing. Down Second Avenue is a landmark book that describes Mphahlele’s experience growing up in segregated South Africa. Vivid, graceful, and unapologetic, it details a daily life of severe poverty and brutal police surveillance under the subjugation of an apartheid regime. Banned in South Africa after its original 1959 publication for its protest against apartheid, Down Second Avenue is a foundational work of literature that continues to inspire activists today. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

In 1946, the young Ezekiel Mphahlele published 700 copies of his first collection of short stories, Man Must Live. After a stint in the mid-1950s as fiction editor of Drum, he went into exile and released a new collection, In Corner B, with the East African Publishing House in Nairobi in 1967. This edition contains the core of that landmark collection, together with more recent stories written by him after his return to South Africa as Es'kia Mphahlele. --Publisher.

In Corner B

Father Come Home

"The essays and public addresses of scholar, teacher, philosopher, and activist Es'kia Mphahlele are presented in this collection spanning 40 years of recent African history. The intellectual and distinctly South African perspective exhibited in these writings is enriched by humor and autobiographical anecdotes. Subjects addressed include African literature and literary criticism, education in a democratic South Africa, relations between Africans and African Americans, negritude, African identity, and African humanism. A critical introduction, full biography, bibliography, and brief synopsis of each essay are included."

Education, African Humanism & Culture, Social Consciousness, Literary Appreciation

Es'kia

Es'kia Mphahlele

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