Books

Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

  • Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
  • Pub. Date: February 2009
  • ISBN-13: 9781594202001
  • Sales Rank: 444
  • 368pp

Synopsis

Noted historian Martha A. Sandweiss tells the uniquely American story of Clarence King, a man who hid from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family the fact that he lived a double life---as the celebrated white explorer, geologist, and writer King and as a black Pullman porter and steelworker named James Todd.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

Passing Strange tells an astounding true story that would beggar most novelists' imaginations…Ms. Sandweiss offers a fine, mesmerizing account of how one extremely secretive man, "acting from a complicated mix of loyalty and self-interest, reckless desire and social conservatism," could encapsulate his country's shifting ideas about race in the course of one family's anything but black-and-white history.

Biography

Martha A. Sandweiss received her Ph.D. in history from Yale University and worked for many years as a museum curator and director before becoming professor of American studies and history at Amherst College. She is the author of numerous works on western American history and the history of photography, including Print the Legend: Photography and the American West, winner of the Organization of American Historians' Ray Allen Billington Award, and Laura Gilpin: An Enduring Grace and is the coeditor of the Oxford History of the American West.