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Passing Strange |
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| Book: Paperback | 8.26 x 5.23in | 384 pages | ISBN 9780143116868 | 26 Jan 2010 | Penguin | 18 - AND UP |
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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 War to civil rights.
Read Martha A. Sandweiss's posts on the Penguin Blog
Passing Strange
Prologue: An Invented Life
Part One: Clarence King and Ada Copeland
1. Becoming Clarence King
2. King of the West
3. Becoming Ada Copeland
4. King of the City
Part Two: James and Ada Todd
5. New Beginnings
6. Family Lives
7. Breakdowns
8. Endings
Part Three: Ada King
9. On Her Own
10. The Trial
Epilogue: Secrets
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
National Book Critics Circle Award: Nominee 2010
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