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Through the essays in the Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois made what he himself referred to as 'the problem of the color line' a central subject in the intellectual tradition of the West. But a recognition of this momentous achievement does only partial justice to Du Bois' masterpiece, which, in its lyricism and the ease with which it moves from the immediacy of journalism and sociology to the permanence of literature, reveals the ways in which profound, seemingly intractable historical dilemmas can, in the right hands, be transformed into the matter of art.
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