Hero Tales »

In 1953, a young James Baldwin published Go Tell It on the Mountain, winning acclaim as a literary star and one of the leading voices of the African-American experience. Although Baldwin would spend the bulk of his adult life in France, his writing always addressed the complexities at the heart of America, viewed through the lens of the consummate outsider.

The author of Hero Tales is James Baldwin, a self-educated pioneer of American education, born in 1841 in Indiana. Although he never attended school himself, Baldwin founded a public high school, the first school library, and a school district in his native Indiana. During the latter part of his career, he was an editor and author of school textbooks, first for Harper & Brothers, and then for the American Book Company. So prolific was Baldwin as an author and editor, it was said that at one point in time, half of all the books in American schools were either written or edited by him. Baldwin's literary legacy may have been forgotten today in the rush to substitute multiculturalism for more traditional tales taught and enjoyed in previous years. Baldwin re-told classic heroic tales for their interest to young students -- the Song of Roland, the Iliad, and the Nibelungenlied. Hero Tales is an anthology of stories compiled from Baldwin's earlier volumes, aimed at younger readers. It contains seventeen stories -- nine of Greek legends and myths, four from the Germanic legends of Siegfried and the Nibelung, and four from the Song of Roland.