Paperback Edition
ISBN: 978-1-55861-397-3
Publication Date: 05-01-2002

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Foreword by Thulani Davis
Afterword by Jennifer Campbell
Other Contributors: John Oliver Killens

This unforgettable novel, first published in 1969 (Delacourt), is a lost classic of American literature written a major figure in the Black Arts movement and the Harlem Writers Guild. This a searing yet lyrical rendition of a woman's life, set in a Maryland fishing village in the 1930s, is "reminiscent of the work of Zora Neale Hurston."--Philadelphia Inquirer

"This novel changed forever the way I saw the world in which I had grown up. In that sense it changed the way I thought and the way I wrote." —Adrienne Rich, author of Of Woman Born

"Saturated in harsh beauty, this book has been and still is for me one of the most important and indispensable books published in my lifetime. We have nothing else quite like it. . . . This is a touchstone book against which to test the lives of those who cannot speak for themselves." —Tillie Olsen, author of Silences

"Sarah Wright's searing yet lyrical rendition of a Southern black woman's life . . . is as compelling as her protagonist's insistence that This Child's Gonna Live. Wright's language is so true to the spoken word, her rhythms so authentic, readers may feel they are hearing her characters rather than meeting them on the printed page." —Barbara Christian, professor, Afro-American studies, University of California, Berkeley

"It has always been my contention that the Black woman in America will write the greatest of the American novels. For it is the Black woman, forced to survive at the bottom rung of American society,...who is compelled to survey, by the very extremity of her existence, the depths of the American soul. In reading Sarah Wright's searing novel, I am convinced that my assessment was correct." —Rosa Guy, author of The Friends