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  • Published: 1 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446400449
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 560
Categories:

Negro with a Hat: Marcus Garvey




The definitive biography of Marcus Garvey from an exciting and talented new writer.

Discover the definitive biography of Marcus Garvey

'Grant is an accomplished storyteller and writes with an elegance leavened by wit and cynicism that makes this book eminently readable' Guardian
At one time during the first half of the twentieth century, Marcus Garvey was the most famous black man on the planet. Hailed as both the 'black Moses' and merely 'a Negro with a hat', he masterminded the first International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World, began the Universal Negro Improvement Association and captivated audiences with his powerful speeches and audacious 'Back to Africa' programme. But he was to end his life in penury, ignominy and friendless exile, after serving jail time in both the US and Jamaica.

With masterful skill, wit and compassion, Colin Grant chronicles Garvey's extraordinary life, the failed business ventures, his misguided negotiations with the Ku Klux Klan, the two wives and the premature obituaries that contributed to his lonely, tragic death. This is the dramatic cautionary tale of a man who articulated the submerged thoughts of an awakening people.

'Engrossing...Writing in a concise, expressive style...drawing on gargantuan research ...Grant show's Garvey's heady triumphs and crushing disappointments, his complexity and his paradoxes' Independent on Sunday

  • Published: 1 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446400449
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 560
Categories:

About the author

Colin Grant

Colin Grant is a historian and author of four highly praised books: Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (2008), I and I: The Natural Mystics Marley, Tosh and Wailer (2011), Bageye at the Wheel (2012), and A Smell of Burning (2016). He is an Associate Fellow in the Centre for Caribbean Studies, and teaches creative non-fiction writing, most recently for Arvon and Sierra Nevada College.

Also by Colin Grant

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Praise for Negro with a Hat: Marcus Garvey

A brisk and well-researched biography... A splendidly colourful book

Daily Telegraph

An elegant and well-researched biography chronicling the triumphs and eventual disappointments of Garvey - black nationalist and Jamaican national hero

The Times

Approaches his subject with care and a storyteller's flair...a diligently researched account

Metro

Engrossing...Writing in a concise, expressive style...drawing on gargantuan research...Grant meticulously chronicles Garvey's eventful odyssey and sheds light on his revolutionary thinking and formidable public speaking...he shows Garvey's heady triumphs and crushing disappointments, his complexity, his paradoxes

Independent on Sunday

Grant is an accomplished storyteller and writes with an elegance leavened by wit and cynicism that makes this book eminently readable

Margaret Busby, Guardian

Gripping and sympathetic...monumental...Grant writes with the quiet authority of a historian who has done a colossal amount of research... and knows the smells and tastes of this period as if he had lived through it. He is slow to pass judgement, but when he does so, the verdict carries real weight... His history reads like a first-rate novel... Grant's book is a fine and valuable monument to [Garvey's] memory

Kevin Jackson, New Statesman

In this superb new biography, Colin Grant portrays Garvey as a showman-ideologue [and] is to be congratulated on this scholarly, well-written account

Sunday Telegraph

Splendid and well-researched biography

The Week