My Father's Shadow: Intergenerational Conflict in African American Men's Autobiography

In My Father's Shadow, David L. Dudley explores a line of African American men's autobiographies. starting with Frederick Douglass and moving on through Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X.

In life, these writers did not enjoy "normal" relationships with their fathers, who were all unknown, absent. or abusive. Damaged and damaging father-son relationships in childhood, Dudley contends, spill over into adult personal and artisti...