Passing strange: a gilded age tale of love and deception across the color line
✍ Scribed by Sandweiss, Martha A.
- Publisher
- Penguin Publishing Group
- Year
- 2009;2014
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 491 KB
- Edition
- 2
- Category
- Fiction
- ISBN-13
- 9781440686153
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Read Martha A. Sandweiss's posts on the Penguin Blog
The secret double life of the man who mapped the American West, and the woman he loved
Clarence King was a late nineteenth-century celebrity, a brilliant scientist and explorer once described by Secretary of State John Hay as "the best and brightest of his generation." But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family in Newport: for thirteen years he lived a double life-the first as the prominent white geologist and writer Clarence King, and a second as the black Pullman porter and steelworker named James Todd. The fair, blue-eyed son of a wealthy China trader passed across the color line, revealing his secret to his black common-law wife, Ada Copeland, only on his deathbed. In Passing Strange , noted historian Martha A. Sandweiss tells the dramatic, distinctively American tale of a family built along the fault lines of celebrity, class, and race- a story that spans the long century from Civil...