num_pages: 432
description: From National Book Award winner Edward Ball comes The Sweet Hell Inside, the story of the fascinating Harleston family of South Carolina, the progeny of a Southern gentleman and his slave, who cast off their blemished roots and prospered despite racial barriers. Enhanced by recollections from the family's archivist, eighty-four-year-old Edwina Harleston Whitlock -- whose bloodline the author shares. The Sweet Hell Inside features a celebrated portrait artist whose subjects included industrialist Pierre du Pont; a black classical composer in the Lost Generation of 1920s Paris; and an orphanage founder who created the famous Jenkins Orphanage Band, a definitive force in the development of ragtime and jazz. With evocative and engrossing storytelling, Edward Ball introduces a cast of historical characters rarely seen cultured, vain, imperfect, rich, and black -- a family of eccentrics who defied social convention and flourished.
language: English
title: The Sweet Hell Inside: The Rise of an Elite Black Family in the Segregated South
titlecomplete: The Sweet Hell Inside: The Rise of an Elite Black Family in the Segregated South
genres: Biography, African American, Nonfiction, History, Biography Memoir
ratings_count: 150
publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks