Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community

by Martin Duberman

Overview

With faculty and alumni that included John Cage, Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Olson, Josef and Anni Albers, Paul Goodman, and Robert Rauschenberg, Black Mountain College ranked among the most important artistic and intellectual communities of the twentieth century. In his groundbreaking history, Martin Duberman uses interviews, anecdotes, and research to depict the relationships that made Black Mountain College what it was. Black Mountain documents the college’s twenty-three-year tenure, from its most brilliant moments of self-reinvention to its lowest moments of petty infighting. It records the financial difficulties that beleaguered the community throughout its existence and the determination it took to keep the college in operation. Duberman creates a nuanced portrait of this community so essential to the development of American arts and counterculture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810125940
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	03/13/2009
Pages:	616
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Martin Duberman is distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the City University of New York. He is the author of some twenty books, including Charles Francis Adams (winner of the Bancroft Prize); James Russell Lowell (finalist for the National Book Award); Paul Robeson (winner of the George Freedley Memorial Award); Left Out: The Politics of Exclusion, Essays 1964-2002; The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein (finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Biography); and Cures: A Gay Man’s Odyssey. His recent novel Haymarket has been published in several languages, and his play In White America won the Drama Desk Award. He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Preface
1. The Rollins Fracas
2. A Beginning
3. Anni and Josef Albers
4. The Thirties
5. Schism
6. A New Home
7. The Split
8. Aftermaths and Continuities
9. New Definitions of Community
10. Entries and Exits
11. Transition
12. A New Black Mountain
13. Olson
14. Expelled and Imploding

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Fascinating history with a resonance that far exceeds the experience of the Black Mountaineers themselves."—Newsweek

"Reading the book, it is hard to imagine how it might have been done more intelligently."—Catharine R. Stimpson, The Nation

"[Black Mountain] leaps beyond the discipline of history in its significance . . . Henceforth debates about the relation between historian and sources will have to take account of this radically new model for doing history."—Jesse Lemisch, New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher