Virginia Hamilton: Five Novels
by Virginia Hamilton

Sometimes called the Toni Morrison of children’s literature (The Crisis), Virginia Hamilton wove Black folktales and narratives of African American life and history into her fiction, a body of work she collectively described as liberation literature. Library of America now presents five of her most beloved novels together in one volume for the first time.

In the female coming-of-age story Zeely (1967), Hamilton’s first novel, Geeder Perry and her brother, Toeboy, go to their uncle’s farm for the summer and encounter a six-and-a-half-foot-tall Watusi queen and a mysterious night traveler.Inthe Edgar Allan Poe Award-winning The House of Dies Drear (1968), Thomas Small and his family move to the great and forbidding House of Dies Drear, once a waystation on the Underground Railroad. Can they unlock the house’s secrets before it’s too late? The Planet of Junior Brown(1971), a National Book Award finalist and Newbery Honor Book, tells the story of a three-hundred-pound musical prodigy who plays a piano with no sound while his homeless friend draws on all his wit and New York City resources to save him. In M.C. Higgins, the Great(1974), the first book ever to win the John Newbery Medal, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and the National Book Award, Mayo Cornelius Higgins, called M.C., sits atop a forty-foot pole on the side of Sarah’s Mountain and dreams of escape. But poised above his family’s home is a massive spoil heap from strip-mining that could come crashing down at any moment. Can he rescue his family and save his own future? Must he choose? Confronting such issues as child abuse, single-parent families, and the death of a young person, Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982) novel turns on the appearances and disappearances of a ghost, Brother Rush. It won the Boston Globe-Horn Book and Coretta Scott King awards and was a Newbery Honor Book. Rounding out the volume are a selection of essays and speeches about the novels, including Hamilton’s Newbery acceptance speech for M. C. Higgins, the Great.