The Quest of the Silver Fleece

Originally published in 1911, The Quest of the Silver Fleece was the first novel to come from world-famous sociologist and civil-rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois. A controversial title of its time, the novel chronicles the complex interactions between Northern financing and Southern politics as it follows the story of free-spirited Zora, child of a Southern swamp, and her romance with Yankee-educated Bles, who will eventually face the opportunity to claim political power through corrupt means. In the middle of it all is the silver fleece, a crop of cotton rich with meaning and symbolism.

In the tradition of other incendiary novels that explore market forces at the turn of the century, such as Frank Norris’s The Pit and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, The Quest of the Silver Fleece was seen as an “economic study” by Du Bois, yet it was also a romantic and otherwordly saga, loosely based on the Greek myth from which it takes its name. Using literary conventions to expose and oppose America’s views on race, Du Bois presents a sprawling and provocative work that continues to engage readers and inspire debate among literary scholars today.

W.E.B. DU BOIS (1868–1963) is regarded as one of the most influential Black leaders of the twentieth century, and his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, first published in 1903, is considered one of the most important works in the African American literary canon. Du Bois later went on to help create the premier civil rights organization, the NAACP, and moved to New York in 1910 to found The Crisis, the association’s magazine.