Home: Social Essays

"Jones/Baraka usually speaks as a Negro--and always as an American. He is eloquent, he is bold. He demands rights--not conditional favors." --New York Times Book Review

In 2007, Akashic Books ushered Amiri Baraka back into the forefront of America's literary consciousness with the short story collection Tales of the Out & the Gone. Now, this reissue of Home--long out of print--features a highly provocative and profoundly insightful collection of 1960s social and political essays.

Home is, in effect, the ideological autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. The two dozen essays that constitute this book were written during a five-year span--a turbulent and critical period for African Americans and whites. The Cuban Revolution, the Birmingham bombings, Robert Williams's Monroe Defense movement, the Harlem riots, the assassination of Malcolm X . . . each changed the way Jones/Baraka looked at America. This progressive change is recorded with honesty, anger, and passion in his writings.