Nobel Laureate Louise Glück and The Persistence of Memory

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels

Louise Glück, the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, identified the two pieces of writing that formed her as a child as William Blake’s “ The Little Black Boy” and Stephen Foster’s minstrel song “ Old Folks At Home “, colloquially known as “Swanee River”. “The Little Black Boy” begins:

My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul…