Ark of Bones and Other Stories

New York: Random House, 1974. First Edition in wraps. VG+ (soiling and light wear each with a touch of rubbing.). A posthumously-published book of nine short stories (including “A Harlem Game,” “Double Nigger,” and “The Crossing”) edited by Eugene B. Redmond, Dumas’s colleague at Southern Illinois University. Dumas “identified with the black power movement during his lifetime [and] was also active in the civil rights movement. At the age of 33, Dumas was shot and killed by a New York City Transit policeman in a case of mistaken identity” (www.poetryfoundation.org). Toni Morrison, author of The Bluest Eye and an editor at Random House at the time of Dumas’s death, championed Dumas’s work, even organizing a book release event “with a glamorous guest list comprising the most renowned black writers of the time,” commenting in an announcement for the book launch party, “in those thirty-three years he had completed work the quality and quantity of which are almost never achieved in several lifetimes" (see the story on Dumas at www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch). “Whether he is discussing the stillness of Arkansas or the static of Harlem, Dumas is clearly among the aristocrats of storytellers. Black life has never had a more powerful voice.”