When It's Darkness on the Delta
How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land
$50.62
- Hardcover
264 pages
- Release Date
17 February 2026
Summary
For readers of The Sum of Us and South to America, an essential new look at the roots of American inequality—and the seeds of its transformation.
Once the powerhouse of a fledgling country’s economy, the Mississippi Delta has been consigned to a narrative of destitution. It is often faulted for the sins of the South, portrayed as a regional backwater that willfully cleaved itself from the modern world. But buried beneath the weight of good ol’ boy politics and white-…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807045329 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0807045322 |
| Author: | W. Ralph Eubanks |
| Publisher: | Beacon Press |
| Imprint: | Beacon Press |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 264 |
| Release Date: | 17 February 2026 |
| Weight: | 567g |
| Dimensions: | 229mm x 152mm |
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What They're Saying
Critics Review
“Native son, erudite scholar, and deep-seeing observer, Eubanks gets down into the nitty-gritty of Mississippi with this marvelous Delta travelogue and analysis. He makes those lonely backroads come alive in all their difficult, complicated history.”
—Richard Grant, author of Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta
“When It’s Darkness on the Delta is as brilliant and necessary as the greatest books made by a Mississippian, but it is wholly singular in the way Ralph Eubanks nimbly, and profoundly, rides the voices of the folks making the Delta today. This book is not interested in representation; it is what happens when the responsible love of a people, a region, and an utterly legendary skill meet. Goodness gracious. We are thankful.”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
“This is an important book. Eubanks speaks truth to power about an iconic and ill-understood American landscape and proves beyond question that as the Mississippi Delta goes, so goes our republic.”
—Richard Ford
“I am from the coast of Mississippi. Growing up, the Delta was as foreign to me as another country. They talked differently up there. The air didn’t smell right. But W. Ralph Eubanks’s When It’s Darkness on the Delta brings the Delta home to me. With stunningly beautiful prose and an intimacy that breaks down assumptions, he renders this part of Mississippi with tenderness and unflinching honesty. He tells its story (his family’s story) and, in doing so, he tells the American story. And, even though it is one filled with resilience, it ain’t pretty. What a precious gift.”
—Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of Begin Again
About The Author
W. Ralph Eubanks
W. Ralph Eubanks is a faculty fellow and writer in residence at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of A Place Like Mississippi- A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape, as well as two other works of nonfiction, Ever Is a Long Time and The House at the End of the Road. He is a writer and an essayist whose work focuses on race, identity, and the American South, and his writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, the American Scholar, the Georgia Review, and the New Yorker. He is a 2007 Guggenheim fellow, a 2021-2022 Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow, and the recipient of a 2023 Mississippi Governor’s Arts Award for excellence in literature and in recognition of his role as a cultural ambassador for the state of Mississippi.
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