Book Faces

Across the first half of the twentieth century, author portraits migrated from the frontispiece inside of books to the exterior covers of dust jackets; at the same time, while Jim Crow segregation reached its repressive heights in the United States, African-American literature enjoyed unprecedented circulation in the mainstream literary marketplace. This chapter traces this convergence to explore the cultural work performed by the “face” of a book—frontispieces, dust jackets, and author portraits. Examining these lays bare the signal development that distinguishes mid-twentieth-century African-American authorship from its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century precedents: namely, the turn away from writing as corroboration of black humanity to writing as expressive of black pluralities or personae. By setting alterity, not authenticity, as the threshold where readers meet and interpret black literature as works of art, the migration of author portraits also functions as a trope for the ethics of reading.