Books by Werner Sollors

What unites and what divides Americans as a nation? Who are Americans, and can they strike a balance between an emphasis on divergent ethnic origins and what they have in common? Opening with a survey of American literature through the vantage point of ethnicity, Werner Sollors examines Americans evolving understanding of themselves and the key role writing has played in that process.

In Germany the end of World War II calls forth images of obliterated cities, hungry refugees, and ghostly monuments to Nazi crimes. Drawing on diaries, photographs, essays, reports, fiction and film, Werner Sollors makes visceral the sorrow and anger, guilt and pride, despondency and resilience of a defeated people--and the paradoxes of occupation.

From the origins of the term "race" to the cultural sources of the "Tragic Mulatto," and from the calculus of color to the retellings of various plots, Sollors examines what we know about race, analyzing recurrent motifs in scientific and legal works as well as in fiction, drama, and poetry.

In the first half of the 20th century, the U.S. moved to the center of global cultural production. How did African American, European immigrant, and other minority writers take part in these transformative developments? This book attempts to address this question in a series of close readings of major texts from this period.