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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
