The advent of urban realism
Despite the enormous outpouring of creativity during the 1920s, the vogue of Black writing, Black art, and Black culture waned markedly in the early 1930s as the Great Depression took hold in the United States. African American pundits in the 1930s and ’40s tended to depreciate the achievements of the New Negroes, calling instead for a more politically engaged, socially critical realism in literature.
Richard Wright
The chief proponent of this position was Richard Wright, whose fiction, autobiography, and social commentary dominated African American literature from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. A migrant from Mississippi with barely a ninth-grade education, Wright set the tone for the post-New Negro era with Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), a collection of novellas set in the Jim Crow South that evidenced Wright’s strong affinity with Marxism and the influence of American Naturalist writers such as Theodore Dreiser. In 1940 Wright’s monumental novel Native Son appeared, winning thunderous critical acclaim as well as unprecedented financial success. Charting the violent life and death of a poor Chicago youth, Native Son revived the protest tradition of 19th-century African American literature while eschewing its moralizing, sentimentality, and political conservatism. Wright’s autobiography Black Boy (1945) also revisited a 19th-century tradition, the slave narrative, to chronicle his quest, as much intellectual as physical, from an oppressive South to anticipated freedom in Chicago. After the critical and popular success of Black Boy in the mid-1940s, Wright moved to Paris, where he continued to publish fiction and travel books, though none matched the achievement of his work in the 1940s. Nevertheless, the stamp Wright placed on African American prose remained evident in the work of novelists such as William Attaway, Chester Himes, and Ann Petry, which has often been interpreted as belonging to “the Wright school” of social realism. Petry’s The Street (1946) adopted Wright’s pitiless assessment of the power of environment in the lives of Black urban dwellers, but, unlike Wright, whose female characters generally exemplify demoralization and passivity, Petry created a female protagonist who fights back.
Chicago writers
The Chicago Defender, one of the premier African American newspapers of the 20th century, portrayed the Windy City as a cultural and economic mecca for Black migrants fleeing the South during the Great Depression. Wright, who moved from Memphis, Tennessee, to Chicago in 1927, found in the South Side of Chicago a lively community of young African American writers, among them poet Margaret Walker, playwright Theodore Ward, poet and journalist Frank Marshall Davis, and novelist and children’s book author Arna Bontemps. Chicago-based Abbott’s Monthly (1930–33), established by the Defender’s editor, Robert Abbott, published the work of Wright and Himes for the first time, while New Challenge (1937), edited by novelist Dorothy West and Wright, helped the fledgling Chicago Black literary renaissance expound its purpose. In the 1940s Negro Digest and Negro Story, also literary products of Chicago’s South Side, provided outlets for fiction writers, poets, and essayists. Encouraged by the Chicago and New York units of the Federal Theatre Project, African American drama advanced during the Depression, led by Abram Hill, founder of the American Negro Theatre in Harlem; Hughes, whose play Mulatto (produced 1935) reached Broadway with a searching examination of miscegenation; and Ward, whose Big White Fog (produced 1938) was the most widely viewed African American drama of the period.
The 1940s
During the 1930s and ’40s Hughes and Sterling A. Brown kept the folk spirit alive in African American poetry. An admirer of Hughes, Margaret Walker dedicated For My People (1942), the title poem of which remains one of the most popular texts for recitation and performance in African American literature, to the same Black American rank and file whom Hughes and Brown celebrated. By the early 1940s three figures, Melvin B. Tolson, Robert Hayden, and Chicagoan Gwendolyn Brooks, were showing how the vernacular tradition could be adapted to modernist experimentation. The variety of expressiveness and formal innovation in African American poetry of the 1940s is reflected in Tolson’s densely allusive Rendezvous with America (1942), Hayden’s meditative history poems such as “Middle Passage” (1945) and “Frederick Douglass” (1947), and Brooks’s tribute to the vitality and rigors of Black urban life in A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and her Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, Annie Allen (1949). The 1940s was also a decade of creative experimentation in autobiography, led by Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn (1940), a self-styled “essay toward an autobiography of a race concept”; Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), an early venture in “autoethnography,” the writing of self via the characterization of a culture (in this case, the rural Southern Black culture of Hurston’s roots); J. Saunders Redding’s No Day of Triumph (1942), the story of an alienated Northern professional’s quest for redemptive immersion in Southern Black working-class communities; and Wright’s Black Boy.
Ralph Ellison
In 1949 the young New York essayist James Baldwin, a protégé of Wright, published “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” a criticism of protest fiction from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Native Son. Baldwin’s charge that the protest novel was prone to categorize humanity rather than reflect its full “beauty, dread, and power” heralded a shift in the 1950s away from Wright’s brand of realism. The most enduring African American novel of the 1950s, Invisible Man (1952), by another Wright protégé, Ralph Ellison, answered Baldwin’s call for “a new act of creation,” a new kind of Black hero, and a new way of picturing that hero’s participation in the post-Depression, post-World War II American reality. The protagonist of Ellison’s novel is an unnamed Black everyman who makes the traditional journey in African American literature from the South to the North, where he goes in search of conventional success and ends up, through a series of ironic revelations, discovering himself. The Invisible Man has been called a modern Odysseus and a 20th-century Candide, in tribute to Ellison’s ability to invest in his central character a universality that bespeaks its author’s wide reading in Western myth and European, British, and American literature. But foremost the Invisible Man is a Black American engaged, willy-nilly, in an often painful process of education. Part Douglass, part Washington, and part Du Bois, he struggles with the dominant “isms,” from Freudianism to Marxism, of the first half of the 20th century to decide what Black intellectual leadership can and should be in the second half of the century. Encountering a volatile American reality that defies every political or philosophical attempt to define and control it, the Invisible Man comes to realize that his African American folk and cultural heritage, embodied in a series of Black antagonists and enigmatic mentors, represents some of the most valuable wisdom he needs in order to discover his role and responsibilities in modern America. Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953, reflecting the enormously positive critical reception the novel enjoyed. Ellison never published another novel during his lifetime, but his essays, reviews, and interviews, published as Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), acknowledged his unwavering commitment to a pluralistic ideal of art that knows no allegiance to any school or program.