Poetry | John F. Allen Author

In this week’s blog post, I’m celebrating the rich history and influential accomplishments of black writers of poetry, literary fiction and romance.

This is Part Two of a two-part post.

Black writers continued to flourish even beyond The Harlem Renaissance and on into the Civil Right Era.

During a time known as The Great Migration—which began after World War I and continued through 1970—many blacks moved from the South and headed North in search of greater opportunities and equal treatment.

Many ventured to large northern cities like Chicago and Northern Indiana, where they found work in factories and other industries.

The migration from the south gave rise to a new sense of independence within the Black community and contributed to the growth of black urban culture developed during the Harlem Renaissance. It also sparked the growing Civil Rights movement which had a powerful impact upon the voice of that era, ranging from the 1940’s through the 1960’s.

The activists of the Civil Rights movement in their efforts gave the writers of the time a platform in which to address issues such as ending segregation, racism and to develop a new sense of Black Nationalism.

A profound writer of this period was James Baldwin, whose work addressed issues of race and sexuality. He is perhaps best known for his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. He wrote stories and essays which were personal reflections that examined the nature of being both black and homosexual when neither was accepted in American society and culture.

Baldwin wrote nearly 20 books, which included Another Country and The Fire Next Time.

Another writer of that era was Richard Wright. He and Baldwin were friends and he called Wright “the greatest Black writer in the world for me”. Wright is perhaps best known for his novel Native Son (1940), which told the story of Bigger Thomas, a Black man who struggled for acceptance in Chicago.

Baldwin was so impressed by the novel that he titled a collection of his own essays Notes of a Native Son, in reference to Wright’s novel. However, their friendship fell apart due to one of the book’s essays, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” which criticized Native Son for lacking credible characters and psychological complexity. Among Wright’s other books are the autobiographical novel Black Boy (1945), The Outsider (1953), and White Man, Listen! (1957).

Another novelist of this period was Ralph Ellison, best known for his novel Invisible Man (1952), which won the National Book Award in 1953. Even though he did not complete another novel during his lifetime, Invisible Man was so influential that it secured his place in literary history. After Ellison’s death in 1994, a second novel, Juneteenth (1999), was pieced together from the 2,000-plus pages he had written over 40 years. A fuller version of the manuscript will be published as Three Days Before the Shooting (2008). Jones, Edward, The Known World, 2003 Carter Stephen, New England White 2007 Wright W.D. Crisis of the Black Intellectual, 2007.

During the Civil Right Era, there was a rise in the number of black female poets, one of the most notable being Gwendolyn Brooks, who became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize. It was awarded to her for her 1949 book of poetry, Annie Allen. Along with Brooks, other female poets who reached a level of notoriety during the 1950s and ’60s are Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez.

Also during this time, a number of playwrights came to attain national attention, most notably Lorraine Hansberry, whose famous play A Raisin in the Sun focuses on a poor Black Chicago family living and went on to win the 1959 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.

Another noteworthy playwright who gained attention was Amiri Baraka. She was known for writing controversial off-Broadway plays. In more recent years, Baraka has become known for his poetry and music criticism.

A number of important books and essays dealing with human rights were penned by the Civil Rights leaders. Martin Luther King, Jr‘s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is a leading example.

In the 1970s, black literature began to reach the mainstream as works by black writers continually reached best-selling and award-winning status. This was also during this time that the work of African-American writers finally came to be recognized by academia as a legitimate genre of American literature.

As part of the larger Black Arts Movement, which was inspired by the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, African American literature began to be defined and analyzed. A number of scholars and writers are generally credited with helping to promote and define African-American literature as a genre during this time period, including fiction writers Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and poet James Emanuel to name a few.

Other black writers of note are:

A recent explosion of black romance writers has occured in before unprecedented rates. While the genre is not highly represented by blacks, there are several of note.

Gwen Forster, Brenda Jackson, Carmen Green, Beverly Clark, Celeste O. Norfleet, Kayla Perrin, Donna Hill and Marcia King-Gamble to name a few.

A resurgence of the Urban Lit genre has become popular amongst black writers and readers alike. Some of the most prominent names are:

The undisputed title “Queen of black erotica,” goes to Zane. Her novels have been best sellers and also garnered her a cable series based upon her popular Sex Chronicles series.

Black/African-American literature has enjoyed additional attention due largely to the efforts of talk-show host Oprah Winfrey. She has continually leveraged her fame to promote literature through Oprah’s Book Club. Oprah has brought African-American writers a far larger audience than they might otherwise have received.

In this week’s blog post, I’m celebrating the rich history and influential accomplishments of black writers of poetry, literary fiction and romance.

This is Part One of a two-part post.

The history of black writers is rarely acknowledged before the Harlem Renaissance in mainstream America. Although that period was a great time of growth for blacks in the arts, the history of black writers goes much farther back.

In 1746, Lucy Terry—a black slave in Deerfield, MA—wrote the ballad, “Bars Fight”. The piece wasn’t published until 1854 in The Springfield Republican with an additional couplet and again in Josiah Holland’s History of Western Massachusetts, 1855.

Noted poet Phillis Wheatley’s book, “Poems on Various Subjects”, was published in 1773, prior to the War of Independence. She holds the honor of being the first African American to publish a book and the first to achieve an international reputation as a writer. Wheatley was born in Senegal, but at age seven was captured and sold into slavery. She soon mastered the English language and began writing. Her poetry earned the praise of many leading figures of the American Revolution including George Washington. The validity of her works were often challenged as the white people of the time found it hard to believe that a black person was capable of such refined writing.

The credit for the earliest works of fiction by African American writers goes to William Wells Brown and Victor Séjour. Not very many people know of these men and because of the times in which they lived (1800’s), it is no surprise.

Brown was a prominent abolitionist, lecturer, historian, playwright and novelist during the 1800’s. His novel Clotel (1853) is considered the first novel written by an African American. The novel was published in London, where Brown lived at the time. He was also a pioneer of various literary genres, including travel writing and drama.

Sejour was born in New Orleans as a free man, but moved to France at the age of nineteen. While there, he published his short story “Le Mulâtre” (“The Mulatto”) in 1837. It has the distinction of being the first known work of fiction published by an African American however, it was written in French and published in a French journal, and had no apparent influence on later American literature. Unfortunately, Séjour never returned to African-American themes in his subsequent works.

As time progressed, slavery ended and blacks were attempting to fit themselves into a society which shunned them, a significant period marked a creative surge within the black community. The period was known as the Harlem Renaissance, and ran from 1920 to 1940. Based in the Harlem community in New York City, the Harlem Renaissance was part of a larger peak of social thought and culture within the African American community.

During this time, the US experienced a growth of African American literature and art. It was a turning point for black literature as prior to this time; books written by African Americans were primarily read solely by other blacks. An abundance of Black artists, musicians and others produced classic works in various fields from jazz to theater. However, this movement spurred black literature, fine art and performance art to be absorbed into mainstream American culture, although it can be argued that perhaps the period is best known for the literature that came out of it.

Some of the most renowned writers of this period were: Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, & Zora Neale Hurston to name a few. Hughes first received attention in 1922 with the publication of The Book of American Negro Poetry. The work was edited by James Weldon Johnson as an anthology which featured the work of many of the period’s most talented poets, such as Claude McKay.

McKay went on to publish three novels, Home to Harlem, Banjo and Banana Bottom, as well as a collection of short stories.

Zora Neale Hurston was another prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance. She wrote the classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937. Her works ranged from anthropology to short stories and novels, but unfortunately they fell into obscurity for decades. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that her work was rediscovered thanks to a 1975 article by Alice Walker published in Ms. Magazine.

Despite the fact that by and large Hughes and Hurston were the two most influential and recognizable writers of the era, others became well known also, such as: Jean Toomer, author of Cane—a collection of stories and poems about rural and urban lives of blacks. Dorothy West was another whose novel, The Living is Easy, examined the life of an upper-class black family.

Countee Cullen was also a writer of note, whose poems described the everyday life of blacks. His works include: Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927) and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927).

Other known authors of this period were: Wallace Thurman, author of the novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which focused on intra-racial prejudice between lighter skinned and darker skinned blacks.

Frank Marshall Davis, whose poetry collections, Black Man’s Verse (1935) and I am the American Negro (1937), were published by Black Cat Press, and earned him critical acclaim.

This concludes Part One of The History of Blacks in Literary Fiction and Poetry. Part Two will be featured in the blog post scheduled for next Monday, 18 February 2013.

Friday, 15 February 2013 I will post my review of Carl Weber’s The Man in 3B, STAY TUNED!!!