Contending Forces: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Contending Forces, credited to Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Contending Forces by Pauline E. Hopkins. Read by Margaret Espaillat. Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, despite an impressive record of productivity and creativity as a novelist, playwright, short fiction writer, editor, actress, and singer, is an African-American woman writer who has essentially been consigned to the dustbins of American literary history. Though contemporary with Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, Hopkins is only now beginning to receive the kind of critical attention that Harper has enjoyed for a slightly longer period and that Chesnutt and Dunbar have always had. Hopkins had work published in several genres, but her reputation today rests primarily upon Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, the novel she published in 1900. (Introduction by Margaret)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Contending Forces
• Author credits: Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 23
• Listed recording duration: 9:01:20

Catalogue topics

• hopkins
• novel
• African American

Track guide

1. 00 - [Preface] — 5:17
2. 01 - [A Retrospect of the Past] — 20:01
3. 02 - [The Days 'Before the War' ] — 13:57
4. 03 - [ 'Coming Events cast there Shadows Before'] — 29:42
5. 04 - [The Tragedy] — 21:42
6. 05 - [Ma Smith's Lodging-House] — 23:31
7. 06 - [Ma Smith's Lodging-House - Concluded] — 22:20
8. 07 - [Friendship] — 37:19
9. 08 - [The Sewing-Circle] — 34:55
10. 09 - [Love Took Up the Harp of Life] — 23:44
11. 10 - [The Fair] — 18:13
12. 11 - [The Fair - Concluded] — 30:40
13. 12 - [A Colored Politician] — 27:52
14. 13 - [The American Colored League] — 19:59
15. 14 - [Luke Sawyer Speaks to the League] — 13:06
16. 15 - [Will Smith's Defense of his Race] — 15:47
17. 16 - [John Langley Consults Madam Frances] — 18:10
18. 17 - [The Canterbury Club Dinner] — 21:46
19. 18 - [What Easter Sunday Brought] — 28:39
20. 19 - [The Bitter Arrow] — 23:51
21. 20 - [Mother-Love] — 28:40
22. 21 - [After Many Days] — 37:13
23. 22 - ['So He brineth them into his desired Haven'] — 25:01

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.