The Postwar African American Novel: Protest and Discontent, 1945-1950
Stephanie Brown
Abstract
Americans in the World War II era bought the novels of African American writers in unprecedented numbers. However, the names on the books lining shelves and filling barracks trunks were not the now-familiar Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but Frank Yerby, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, and J. Saunders Redding. This book recovers the work of these innovative novelists, overturning conventional wisdom about the writers of the period and the trajectory of African American literary history. The book also questions the assumptions about the relations between race and genre that have obscur ... More
Americans in the World War II era bought the novels of African American writers in unprecedented numbers. However, the names on the books lining shelves and filling barracks trunks were not the now-familiar Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but Frank Yerby, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, and J. Saunders Redding. This book recovers the work of these innovative novelists, overturning conventional wisdom about the writers of the period and the trajectory of African American literary history. The book also questions the assumptions about the relations between race and genre that have obscured the importance of these once-influential creators. Wright’s Native Son is typically considered to have inaugurated an era of social realism in African American literature. Ellison’s Invisible Man has been cast as both a high mark of American modernism and the only worthy stopover on the way to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. However, readers in the late 1940s purchased enough copies of Yerby’s historical romances to make him the best-selling African American author of all time. Critics, meanwhile, were taking note of the generic experiments of Redding, Himes, and Smith, while the authors themselves questioned the obligation of black authors to write protest, instead penning campus novels, war novels, and, in Yerby’s case, “costume dramas.” Their status as “lesser lights” is the product of retrospective bias, the book demonstrates.
Keywords:
Americans,
World War II,
African American writers,
Frank Yerby,
Chester Himes,
William Gardner Smith,
J. Saunders Redding,
historical romances,
black authors,
campus novels
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781604739732 |
| Published to University Press of Mississippi: March 2014 |
DOI:10.14325/mississippi/9781604739732.001.0001 |
