How long does it take to read The Blacker the Berry?
a novel of Negro life.
The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman takes about 4 hours 9 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 9 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1929. 226 pages, about 62,150 words.
9 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 6 hours 54 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 9 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 35 minutes |
The page count is the median across 10 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
One of the most widely read and controversial works of the Harlem Renaissance, The Blacker the Berry...was the first novel to openly explore prejudice within the Black community. This pioneering novel found a way beyond the bondage of Blackness in American life to a new meaning in truth and beauty. Emma Lou Brown's dark complexion is a source of sorrow and humiliation -- not only to herself, but to her lighter-skinned family and friends and to the white community of Boise, Idaho, her home-town. As a young woman, Emma travels to New York's Harlem, hoping to find a safe haven in the Black Mecca of the 1920s. Wallace Thurman re-creates this legendary time and place in rich detail, describing Emma's visits to nightclubs and dance halls and house-rent parties, her sex life and her catastrophic love affairs, her dreams and her disillusions -- and the momentous decision she makes in order to survive. A lost classic of Black American literature, The Blacker the Berry...is a compelling portrait of the destructive depth of racial bias in this country. A new introduction by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, author of The Sweeter the Juice, highlights the timelessness of the issues of race and skin color in America.
Subjects: Fiction, African American women, African Americans, Psychology, New york (n.y.), fiction, African americans, fiction
