Kenneth W. Warren

We questioned 369 patients with histologically proved cancer of the pancreas and 644 control patients about their use of tobacco, alcohol, tea, and coffee. There was a weak positive association between pancreatic cancer and cigarette smoking, but we found no association with use of cigars, pipe tobacco, alcoholic beverages, or tea. A strong association between coffee consumption and pancreatic cancer was evident in both sexes. The association was not affected by controlling for cigarette use. For the sexes combined, there was a significant dose-response relation (P approximately 0.001); after adjustment for cigarette smoking, the relative risk associated with drinking up to two cups of coffee per day was 1.8 (95% confidence limits, 1.0 to 3.0), and that with three or more cups per day was 2.7 (1.6 to 4.7). This association should be evaluated with other data; if it reflects a causal relation between coffee drinking and pancreatic cancer, coffee use might account for a substantial proportion of the cases of this disease in the United States.

African American literature is over. With this provocative claim Kenneth Warren sets out to identify a distinctly African American literature - and to change the terms with which we discuss it. Rather than contest other definitions, Warren makes a clear and compelling case for understanding African American literature as creative and critical work written by black Americans within and against the strictures of Jim Crow America. Within these parameters, his book outlines protocols of reading that best make sense of the literary works produced by African American writers and critics over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. In Warren's view, African American literature begged the question: what would happen to this literature if and when Jim Crow was finally overthrow? Thus, imagining a world without African American literature was essential to that literature. In support of this point, Warren focuses on three moments in the history of Phylon, an important journal of African American culture. In the dialogues Phylon documents, the question of whether race would disappear as an organizing literary category emerges as shared ground for critical and literary practice. Warren also points out that while scholarship by black Americans has always been the province of a petit bourgeois elite, the strictures of Jim Crow enlisted these writers in a politics that served the race as a whole. Finally, Warren's work sheds light on the current moment in which advocates of African American solidarity insist on a past that is more productively put behind us.

Acknowledgments Introduction 1: Reading Henry James 2: Aesthetics, Race, and Warrants of Decency 3: The Persistence of Uncle Tom and the Problem of Critical Distinction 4: Black and White Strangers Conclusion Notes Index