Deep River

One voice. One song. And the whole world turned to listen.

Harlem, 1924. Paul Robeson holds a law degree from Columbia, a growing reputation as an athlete and a scholar, and a restless gift he cannot yet name. The law offers him a career that will never let him forget his color. Then the stage claims him. All God's Chillun Got Wings and The Emperor Jones set New York talking, and on an April night in 1925, Paul and the pianist Lawrence Brown walk onto a Greenwich Village stage with nothing but the spirituals their fathers' people carried out of slavery. The concert sells out. American music is never quite the same.

From "Ol' Man River" in London to Othello at the Savoy, from Mayfair drawing rooms to the lecture halls of the School of Oriental Studies, Paul becomes one of the most celebrated artists on earth. Beside him, Essie manages his career, guards their son, and fights to hold together a marriage under enormous strain, a marriage tested by fame, long separations, and silence, and held together by something stronger than either of them can admit.

And as Paul begins to study the languages of Africa, a harder question grows louder than any applause: who is he, when the world finally knows his name? And what does he owe the people whose songs made him famous?

Inside this novel

• The 1925 Greenwich Village concert that brought the spirituals to the concert hall
• Harlem in its renaissance, and the London stage that made Robeson a star
• "Ol' Man River," Show Boat, and the 1930 Othello
• A marriage tested by fame, distance, and love, told from both sides
• Robeson's turn toward Africa, its languages, and his own roots
• An afterword that shows what is documented and what is imagined

Lush, dramatic, and deeply researched, Deep River is the soaring second novel of The Robeson Quintet: the story of how a young man from Princeton became the voice of his people, and what that voice would cost him.

For readers of biographical historical fiction, the Harlem Renaissance, African American music and theater, and stories of love, ambition, and identity. Ideal for book clubs and classrooms.

The Robeson Quintet, in reading order

• Live Anyhow (prequel)
• Book One: The Favored Race
• Book Two: Deep River
• Book Three: The Artist Must Elect
• Book Four: The Silencing
• Book Five: The Tallest Tree