Margaret Walker became the first African American to win a national
literary award when her collection For My People was chosen for the
Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1942. Over the next fifty years she
enriched American literature in endless ways through her writings
and, in 1993, she received the National Book Award for Lifetime
Achievement.
This Is My
Century is Walker's own defining summation of her career.
Selected by the author herself, the one hundred poems include
thirty-seven previously uncollected pieces and the entire contents of
three hard-to-find volumes: the award-winning For My People
(1942), Prophets for a New Day (1970), and October Journey
(1975).
