New York: Dial Press, 1972. dj. Hardcover first edition - African American poet and novelist's important first book - a study of Black writers in America, focusing the concept of the hero and the rule breaker using the writings of James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones and Ernest Gaines, among others. Williams was the daughter of migrant African American farm workers and she picked cotton in California's central valley as a child, a single parent, who became not only an honored professor but one of the first to teach the study of African American literature, a poet, playwright, a Caldecott winning children's writer and an author whose only published novel was nominated for the Pulitzer, all in a too brief life cut short by cancer. Bibliography. 252 pages