DU BOIS, W. E. B. The quest of the silver fleece..........net   1 35
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Citation: A.C. McClurg & Co. A Classified Catalogue of Selected Standard Books Suitable for a Public Library Proportioned in Accordance with Approved Library Methods, Fourth Edition. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1912. [DuBois on p.12.]
Notes: The book title was not italicized and not placed in initial capital letters, with the exception of "The". The words "Negro" and "Negroes" were not capitalized in the original.

     Professor Du Bois is the author of "The Souls of Black Folk," now in its eighth edition. His new novel is a work of unusual power, of stern realism, and of great beauty.
     The story is laid in the South and in Washington, and not only shows the struggles — often against impossible odds — of the negro [sic] who desires to develop his personality, but shows the economic roots of many of the injustices which stand between the negro [sic] and the open sky of real treedom.
     From the standpoint ot his hero and heroine, feeling their woes as only a brother in blood can, and seeing the geneisis of those woes as only a trained sociologist can, Dr. Du Bois, the admitted prophet and idealist of his race, makes a plea for them that cannot be evaded.

An exchange between sweethearts.

  Silk suspenders, candy, hand bag, watch, toilet set, manicure set, and such books as "Quest of the Silver Fleece" and "Souls of Black Folk," by Du Bois, or "Lyrics of Lowly Life," by Dunbar.  [p.93]

An exchange between brother and sister.

  Hosiery, Hydegrade petticoat, willow plume, hand bag, manicure set, safety razor and such books at Du Bois' "Quest of the Silver Fleece" and "Souls of Black Folk," Miller's "Race Adjustment," Paynter's "Joining the Navy," Gibbon's "Flower o' the Peach," etc.  [p.93]

     "The Quest of the Silver Fleece," by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, '90, announced by A. C. McClurg, describes the struggles of the negro [sic] who attempts to develop his personality."
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 Citation: Anonymous. "'The Quest of the Silver Fleece,' by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois." Harvard Graduates' Magazine, Vol. 20, No. 78 (December 1911): 382.

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Citation: Anonymous. "Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. Quest of the Silver Fleece." Monthly Bulletin of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, 17:3 (March 1912): 152.
Note: The "D859q" is the library's call number for the book.

    The silver fleece is the cotton, and the beauty of the cotton fields in all the stages of growth is pictured with rare power by one who passionately loves them. Written by a cultivated, college-bred scholar of the colored race, the thoughtful reader is made still more thoughtful by an illuminating glimpse into the racial problem as viewed from the standpoint of the negro, a problem ever-present with his people. Viewed as a story alone it holds one to the end. There is much subtle character drawing. The New England teacher, true to her Puritan ideals through long weary years of isolation and struggle, will appeal to the kindergartner who so often must carry the missionary spirit into untried fields. We are let into the secrets of the cruel manipulation of the cotton market by the Northern financier, in a very powerful chapter; and the trial scene presents an interesting psychological study in its portrayal of the two leading men, each true to his own code of honor, tho [sic] it mean loss to himself; each unable to understand the others [sic] standpoint in a certain particular; each quite unaware of his own moral obliquity in the advantage he takes, the one in the great financial markets of the world, the other in the smaller local labor market. The book may hurt, in a measure our self-esteem; but it should increase our intelligent outlook upon the politics involved, the economics, the ethics, of a serious problem. There are evil tendencies, as there are noble possibilities, in the colored folk, as in every other people; they are distinctly human. The sooner we co-operate with them in their struggle toward a noble self-realization, the less of a problem we leave for posterity. Some years ago race-prejudice wreaked a terrible injustice upon a French Jew. The closing lines of Edwin Markham in his great Dreyfus poem read thus,
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 Note 1 — Citation: Anonymous. "The Quest of the Silver Fleece. By W. E. B. DuBois." Kindergarten-Primary Magazine, 25:1 (September 1912): p.59.
 Note 2: "Negro" is not capitalized in the original text.
 Note 3: Edwin Markham's poem "Dreyfus" can be viewed online at Google Books here.

"Professor DuBois's "The Quest of the Silver Fleece" contains at least one strong dramatic situation; but the author is a sociologist and essayist rather than a novelist." (p.450)
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 Citation: Benjamin Brawley. "The Negro in American Fiction." The Dial, v.60 (May 11, 1916): 445-450.

 The "Quest of the Silver Fleece", and the prose poems in "Souls of Black Folk" and "Darkwater" will win for W. E. B. DuBois a place as a writer long after the controversies over the "race problem" are ended. (p.76)
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 Citation: George Edmund Haynes. The Trend of the Races. NY: Council of Women for Home Missions and Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1922.

    Let me refer briefly to a type of literature in which there have been many pens, but a single mind. Dr. Du Bois is the most variously gifted writer which the race has produced. Poet, novelist, sociologist, historian and essayist, he has produced books in all these fields with the exception, I believe, of a formal book of poems, and has given to each the distinction of his clear and exact thinking, and of his sensitive imagination and passionate vision. The Souls of Black Folk was the book of an era; it was a painful book, a book of tortured dreams woven into the fabric of the sociologist's document. This book has more profoundly influenced the spiritual temper of the race than any other written in its generation. It is only through the intense, passionate idealism of such substance as makes The Souls of Black Folk such a quivering rhapsody of wrongs endured and hopes to be fulfilled that the poets of the race with compelling artistry can lift the Negro into the only full and complete nationalism he knows—that of the American democracy. No other book has more clearly revealed to the nation at large the true idealism and high aspiration of the American Negro.
    In this book, as well as in many of Dr. Du Bois's essays, it is often my personal feeling that I am witnessing the birth of a poet, phoenix-like, out of a scholar. Between The Souls of Black Folk and Darkwater, published four years ago, Dr. Du Bois has written a number of books, none more notable, in my opinion, than his novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece, in which he made Cotton the great protagonist of fate in the lives of the Southern people, both white and black. I only know of one other such attempt and accomplishment in American fiction—that of Frank Norris —and I am somehow of the opinion that when the great epic novel of the South is written this book will prove to have been its forerunner.  (pp.40-41)
Citation: Braithwaite, W.S. 1925. "The Negro in American Literature." Pp.29-44 in Alain Locke (Ed.), The New Negro: An Interpretation (NY: Albert & Charles Boni, Inc.).

 . . . DuBois was followed by the majority of the talented class and himself undertook a semi-propagandist school of social document fiction, of which "The Quest of the Silver Fleece " (1911) is representative, and sentimental belles-lettres of which "Darkwater" is the classic expression. This literature of assertion and protest did perform a valuable service, however, for it encouraged and vindicated cultural equality, and at the price of much melodramatic sentimentalism, did induce a recovery of morale for purely cultural pursuits and self-expression.  [p.240-241]

     More significantly still, sociologically, is the field of fiction. Here arrival at maturity represents more than emotional or technical control, resting as it does on the capacity for social analysis and criticism. Viewed in contrast with such masterfully objective and balanced portrayals of Harlem life as Rudolph Fisher's "The Walls of Jericho" and Claude McKay's "Home to Harlem," the Negro novel of ten or even five years back seems generations less mature. For the work of DuBois, "The Quest of the Silver Fleece ," and even his recent novel "Dark Princess," Jessie Fauset's "There is Confusion," and Walter White's "Fire in the Flint" and "Flight" are all essentially in the category of problem literature, and gain half or more of their value as "social documents."  [pp.243-244]

     The Quest of the Silver Fleece, probably influenced by Frank Morris's trilogy on wheat, has three main themes: the economic position of the Negro agricultural laborer, the subsidizing of certain Negro schools, and Negro life and society in the city of Washington. The tense racial relations in Toomsville, Alabama, the center of the cotton Industry are portrayed. DuBois also satirizes the black and white politicians in Washington and the Southern landowning aristocracy. He discloses divergent Northern attitudes toward Negro education.
     The book surpasses earlier Negro novels because of its background of scholarly investigation and because it fore-shadows the social protest novels which were to come later. Plot and character are subordinated to the effect of the cotton industry on Negroes and poor whites alike in The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Poor whites and Negroes are pitted against each other in order to keep the white land barons in power and the caste system of the South is contrasted against the practicality of the Yankee.  [p.31]

  Again although the issues of economics and equality have been written about often by Du Bois in his journalism work, his literature provides the emotional lift that his journalism can not. Du Bois, like [James Weldon] Johnson and [Pauline E.] Hopkins, is influenced by twentieth century journalism standards that focus on objectivity, fairness, and hard facts. Literature is not bound by those constraints. Nonetheless, what we see with the novel Quest is an expose of the cotton sharecropping industry in the journalistic realm of investigative reporting and muckraking traditions. However, as Wienen and Kraft [citation] pointed out Du Bois's use of literature removes the bluntness in the message with softer edges. Instead of reporting or arguing the need for poor exploited workers to unite as he did in the pages of the Crisis, this argument is dramatized through the simple exchange between Zora and the white woman, who has in tow her crippled son, as a result of corporate greed and capitalism.

  We are better informed readers of Du Bois's literature because of his journalism. We have a greater understanding through his journalism as to Du Bois used art to protest social wrongs. Du Bois saw art as just another means to call attention to issues that needed public protest. Just like his spiritual godfather in Frederick Douglass, Du Bois understood that the strongest way to garner public attention was through the press. He, like Douglass before him, understood the power of the press, and he went about harnessing that power to address issues like equality that were important in the African American community. His journalism through the years provided a blueprint for his literature to follow. Du Bois's journalism protest was the catalyst for the protest writing seen and valued in his literature, making him both a strong newsman and a great propagandist.

  "Du Bois's scholarly novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), brought a new factual political sophistication into the narration of racial struggle, for he explained how the cotton industry affected Washington politics, Northern industrialism, and Southern prejudice." (p.28)
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 Citation: James A. Emanuel. "America Before 1950: Black Writers' Views." Negro Digest, 18:10 (August 1969): 26-34, 67-69.

 In the reformist model the process of racial identity development is interwoven with the processes by which individuals develop the general capacity to function in the general social milieu. The development of a "Black identity" requires "transformation" of a pre-existing identity structure that occurs largely in reaction to a particularly traumatic event. Theorists in this tradition generally focus little attention on the extent to which earlier negative experiences either enhance or retard receptivity to transformation. The term "reformist" appropriately conveys the implicit assumption that an individual will continue to operate primarily within the same socio-environmental context both before and after the transformation process is initiated even though her/his mental processes are altered.

 The radical school of Black psychology maintains that restoration of mental health requires reorientation, i.e. complete immersion in an authentic African definitional system, recognizing that different types of intervention may be required to address different types of misorientation. One dimension of such an African definitional system is a community-based system of African-centered lifestyle rituals that span the life cycle.

 Du Bois used the characters in his published and unpublished novels to explore variations in the psychological orientations of rural African Americans. In The Quest of the Silver Fleece, Blessed Alwyn and Zora Cresswell represent the extremes of personality types within the Black population in the post-Civil War Southern United States. Zora, a wild, sensual, uneducated girl raised in the swamp, had been exposed neither to the socialization processes of the majority culture nor to the institutions indigenous to the Black plantation experience in the South. In contrast, Bles had been reared on a plantation, but reflecting Du Bois' own orientation, he had produced an intense commitment to formal education. However, Du Bois interestingly projects uncritical commitment to formal education as dysfunctional because the traditional content reinforced the status quo and inadequately prepared its recipients to address the realities of the subordination of Blacks. Thus elements of both the reformist and radical approaches are reflected in the implied optimal strategy for psychic liberation.

For Du Bois, then, double consciousness is indeed a universal phenomenon among Blacks. The resistance to pressures to submerge the essence of Black identity varies across personality types and individual circumstances, but all face the problem of "warring ideals."

    The purpose of this essay was to demonstrate how Du Bois used fiction to portray sociological facts on race relations impacting an African American community at the beginning of the twentieth century as portrayed by his novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece. It is argued that the African American community depicted in The Quest of the Silver Fleece reflects conditions that were present in Lowndes County, Alabama in 1906. Du Bois therefore utilized fiction to display his sociological findings for the suppressed Lowndes County study.

    This thesis explores how the traditional classical education of the European elite acted to demonstrate to W.E.B. Du Bois another view of history, and further examines how Du Bois used the material of the ancient world to convey his then-subversive message of equality. By focusing on Du Bois' early life and accomplishments, then on the ancient world both as it is understood today, and as it was understood and appreciated in his time, we can compare his experience to the contemporary nineteenth century and early twentieth century African-American ideology, and determine how Du Bois uniquely used his mastery of the Classics to further his philosophy and goals. In a close study of Du Bois' own published and unpublished texts and letters, we can see how he used Classical references and language to highlight his erudition and to emphasize the agency of his people within history; prior to Du Bois' time, the agency of Africans in empire-building and ancient architecture was hotly debated, making Du Bois' prevalent Classical metaphors a challenge to accepted views of his period. [p. ii]

 Zora goes to work as a maid with another white female character, and it is at this stage that Du Bois presents Zora educating herself with the assistance of Mrs. Vanderpool's library, experiencing Homer and Demosthenes in rich and vibrant detail. Made self-aware and connected to a non-white past as Du Bois himself was, Zora is empowered, and by the end of the novel, returns to the sharecropping region to succeed and buy land for cultivation in the swamp. In altering the familiar tragic mythology, Du Bois is here presenting his audience with his own ideology regarding how a modern and African-American Medea might elevate herself beyond the destructive hunger for revenge, through education and conscious awareness. [p.119]

 . . . Du Bois is anchored by "wonderful fact," an apt description for his use of genre in The Quest of the Silver Fleece. On the one hand, he invokes the wonderful -- the power of love and human freedom. On the other, he is concerned with fact -- with the Realpolitik of power and difference that affected African Americans. Neither mode alone is sufficient, and so Du Bois deploys a type of twoness. With a realist's eye for social critique, he condemns Northern industry and Southern mythology. With a romancer's faith in possibility, he rejects social Darwinism's fatal universe and theories of scientific racism.
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 Citation: Maurice Lee. "Du Bois the Novelist: White Influence, Black Spirit, and The Quest of the Silver Fleece." African American Review, 33:3 (Fall 1999): 389-400.

The Quest of the Silver Fleece is an example of how Du Bois used fictional narratives to aestheticize the Black educational experience and give it a heroic trajectory. For Du Bois and other Black writers of academic novels, the form is a means by which they articulate their subjectivity as intellectuals, as artists, and as producers of knowledge. It is a genre that allows the Black intellectual to interrogate their relationship to academic institutionalism, and to express the possibilities and potentials of an academic life.

     Between 1897 and 1911, W.E.B. Du Bois was vigorously involved in the fight against American racism. In this struggle he used both social scientific methodology and fiction. However, he decided that social science would be his primary tool. Du Bois thought racism was based on misconceptions, and he believed these could be overcome with scientific studies. This thesis will examine how DuBois developed his scientific beliefs, and the extent to which Booker T. Washington and his supporters obstructed DuBois's scientific plans. In this regard, the thesis will explore the special significance of his first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, in his fight against racism.

     By 1911, W.E.B. Du Bois had departed from Atlanta University and his scientific study in Lowndes County had been destroyed. Both of these incidents had very significant impact on his decision to no longer make science his primary method for fighting racism in America. At that time Du Bois decided that his primary means for fighting racism would be propaganda. One important aspect of propaganda, which Du Bois would use, was fiction. Du Bois's use of fiction actually predates his scientific work. The manner in which Du Bois used fiction to fight racism will be examined. Special attention will be given to the similarities between his first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece and his suppressed Lowndes County study.  [p.69]

 Twyman, Bruce Edward. 1991. "W.E.B DuBois and the Use of Social Science and Fiction in the Fight against American Racism 1897-1911". ETD Collection for Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center. Paper 1131. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/dissertations/1131

      The fullest expression of Du Bois's early socialism comes not in his nonfiction prose but in his first novel his 1911 romance the Quest of the Silver Fleece, which offers both a specifically socialist critique of US economics and an alternative economic model originating in cooperative, southern black folkways.
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      The . . . essay both describes the early development of Du Bois's socialism and analyzes the significance of that development. We find three ramifications especially for interpretations of Du Bois and, by extension, for an understanding of African American socialism. First, an early date prevents Du Bois's radical social democracy from being dismissed as an idiosyncracy of his elder years: instead of being the product of his marginalization by the civil rights establishment, Du Bois's socialism was cultivated and maintained during the period when he was the most visible and influential of black Americans, and it was articulated in the pages of the Crisis whereby it reached tens of thousands of NAACP members. An earlier emergence of Du Bois's socialism thus places social democracy closer to the center of African American politics than has usually been supposed. Second, an early date for Du Bois's socialism counteracts the impression that it was unduly influenced by models ill-suited to black America, particularly the supposedly "color-blind" socialism of the Second Internationale. Therefore, although American socialists of this period were seldom able to recognize fully the theoretical contributions being made by Du Bois and other black socialists, those contributions stand, in retrospect, as vital and original developments in American socialism. Moreover, our understanding of Du Boisian socialism has a third important implication, for it helps disentangle Du Bois's socialism from the influence of the Comintern, thereby facilitating a proper emphasis not only on the independence of Du Boisian black socialism but also on Du Bois's commitment to democratic and nonviolent means to achieve social democratic ends.
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    My honest belief is that what has been done in Lowndes County under the Calhoun school and the sensible farseeing guardianship of John Lemon, Pitt Dillingham, and Charlotte Thorn, could be duplicated in every single black belt county of the south.
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