Chapter Fifteen: The Twentieth-Century Black Writer
I. Social Background
Black American literature has to be considered separately for the reason that it is
all tied up with the bitter experience of the Black people. Because of the
opprobrious (粗野的，无礼的) association the term “negro” had acquired through
its southern use----more generally in the common derogatory variant “nigger” ---most Afro-Americans after emancipation much preferred the term “colored”. This
was particularly true of the many freed men and women whose color ranged from
dark brown to light tan (棕褐色的) or “high yellow”, indicating their mixed
ancestry. In 1909 the first important national organization formed to gain respect for
Afro-Americans as a group and improve their conditions named itself the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
However as time went on many of the more militant younger men and women felt
that this terminology was an evasion, betraying a certain shame of one’s African
ancestry, and should be replaced by the term Negro. After WWI the well-educated
leaders of the Harlem Renaissance customarily wrote of “the New Negro”.
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Social Background
The term was also honored in the name of an organization which boasted more than
a million members in 1920. This was instituted by a Jamaican, Marcus Garvey, and
called itself the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).
Today most socially aware Afro-Americans prefer the term “Blacks” which should
therefore be used in any discussion of contemporary writers of issued. It would,
however, be anachronistic(时代错误的) to insert it into material written before
1960.
Until WWI more than three quarters of the black population were concentrated in
the southern states. Except for a comparatively small number of house servants and
a much smaller number of black professionals----doctors, ministers, teachers,
undertakers---southern Negroes worked on the land, usually as sharecroppers with
literally of functionally illiterate and most lived on the level of bare subsistence.
Under the circumstances any black writer who hoped to live by his pen had,
perforce (必然的), to address a white audience. This exposed him to pressure from
at least two directions. Obviously he had to write what would prove acceptable to
his potential white audience.
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Social Background
And since he was writing fro outsiders, for readers who, kindly or unkindly,
sympathetically or contemptuously, thought his people an inferior race, there was a
tacit （默许）censorship imposed both by the black middle class and, often, his
own conscience. This forbade him or her to provide ammunition for the enemy.
Scenes of low life, frank treatment of “uncivilized” behavior, admissions of
fundamental differences, were taboo. The tiny black bourgeoisie to be found in a
very few cities, notably Philadelphia and New York, with some sons and daughters
in Negro colleges, wished to believe, and make the world believe, that Negro society
was just white society in black face. It even aped the color lines drawn by whites,
valuing a light skin and “good hair, and discriminating against its own darker
members. A street jingle ran, “If you are black, get back.” The revolt against the
genteel tradition which shook late nineteenth century American literature did not and
could not appear in Negro literature until after WWI.
In addition to the immaterial barriers with which the black writer had to contend
there were also, of course, enormous material difficulties. It was extremely difficult
for a black writer to get even an occasional magazine story published and almost
impossible to get even an occasional magazine have seen.
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Social Background
Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) did have four novels published but despite an
enthusiastic recommendation by the leading critic of the period, William Dean
Howells, Chesnutt’s novels met with little success and he wrote no more during the
last twenty-seven years of his life. Dunbar, whose poetry we have noted, also wrote
a number of short stories and four novels. Only one of the latter dealt with Negro
life and none were either important or commercially successful. The most valuable
and influential work of the early twentieth-century black writers was, in fact, not
fiction.
One of the most important themes in twentieth-century American history is the
struggle of black Americans for their human and social rights. In 1863, during the
Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln had ended the slavery of blacks. But their
position in American society remained very bad. In the South, especially
government laws were used to keep black Americans in a low social position. There
was also a powerful organization called the Ku Klux Klan which often used
violence against blacks. Around the Turn of the Century, large numbers of blacks
began moving from the South to the cities of the North. In such cities as New York,
their situation was somewhat better. In the North, young black artists and writers
began their long struggle for social justice for their people.
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Harlem Renaissance
"From 1920 until about 1930 an unprecedented outburst of creative activity among
African-Americans occurred in all fields of art. Beginning as a series of literary
discussions in the lower Manhattan (Greenwich Village) and upper Manhattan
(Harlem) sections of New York City, this African-American cultural movement
became known as "The New Negro Movement" and later as the Harlem
Renaissance. More than a literary movement and more than a social revolt against
racism, the Harlem Renaissance exalted the unique culture of African-Americans
and redefined African-American expression. African-Americans were encouraged
to celebrate their heritage and to become "The New Negro," a term coined in 1925
by sociologist and critic Alain LeRoy Locke.
One of the factors contributing to the rise of the Harlem Renaissance was the great
migration of African-Americans to northern cities (such as New York City, Chicago,
and Washington, D.C.) between 1919 and 1926. In his influential book The New
Negro (1925), Locke described the northward migration of blacks as "something
like a spiritual emancipation." Black urban migration, combined with trends in
American society as a whole toward experimentation during the 1920s, and the rise
of radical black intellectuals — including Locke, Marcus Garvey, founder of the
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and W. E. B. Du Bois, editor
of The Crisis magazine — all contributed to the particular styles and unprecedented
success of black artists during the Harlem Renaissance period."
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W.E.B.Du Bois
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Massachusetts in
1868, the year Congress guaranteed male black suffrage. Du Bois
was graduated from Fisk University and Harvard University and
studied two years at the University of Berlin. He was the first black
American to receive the degree of doctor of philosophy from
Harvard.
Du Bois founded the Niagara Movement -- a group of African-American leaders
committed to an active struggle for racial equality. Du Bois was a founder of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and edited its journal,
Crisis, for many years.
A brilliant writer and speaker, Du Bois was the outstanding African-American
intellectual of his time. His The Philadelphia Negro (1899) was the first sociological
study of African-Americans. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois took a forceful
stand against Booker T. Washington's policy of accommodation, calling instead for
"ceaseless agitation and insistent demand for equality," and the "use of force of every
sort: moral suasion, propaganda, and where possible even physical resistance."
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W.E.B.Du Bois
Excerpts: On the Color-line
Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may
show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning
of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest
to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth
Century is the problem of the color-line.
The Forethought
I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and rolling hills lie
like passioned women wanton with harvest. And there in the King's Highway sat and
sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which the traveller's footsteps hasten as they
go. On the tainted air broods fear. Three centuries' thought has been the raising and
unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and
the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
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Jean Toomer (1894-1967)
Jean Toomer was born in 1894 in Washington, D.C, the son of a
Georgian farmer. Though he passed for white during certain
periods of his life, he was raised in a predominantly black
community and attended black high schools. In 1914, he began
college at the University of Wisconsin but transferred to the
College of the City of New York and studied there until 1917.
Toomer spent the next four years writing and published poetry
and prose in Broom, The Liberator, The Little Review and others.
He actively participated in literary society and was acquainted with such prominent
figures as the critic Kenneth Burke, the photographer Alfred Steiglitz and the poet
Hart Crane. In 1921, Toomer took a teaching job in Georgia and remained there four
months; the trip represented his journey back to his Southern roots. His experience
inspired his book Cane, a book of prose poetry describing the Georgian people and
landscape. In the early twenties, Toomer became interested in Unitism, a religion
founded by the Armenian George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. The doctrine taught unity,
transcendence and mastery of self through yoga: all of which appealed to Toomer, a
light-skinned black man preoccupied with establishing an identity in a society of
rigid race distinctions.
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Jean Toomer (1894-1967)
He began to preach the teachings of Gurdjieff in Harlem and later moved
downtown into the white community. From there, he moved to Chicago to create a
new branch of followers. Toomer was married twice to wives who were white, and
was criticized by the black community for leaving Harlem and rejecting his roots
for a life in the white world; however, he saw himself as an individual living above
the boundaries of race. His meditations center around his longing for racial unity,
as illustrated by his long poem "Blue Meridian." He died in 1967.
A Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Cane (1923)
The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer (1980)
Prose
Essentials (1931)
The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer (1980)
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Song of the Son
Pour O pour that parting soul in song,
O pour it in the sawdust glow of night,
Into the velvet pine-smoke air to-night,
And let the valley carry it along.
And let the valley carry it along.
O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree,
So scant of grass, so profligate of pines,
Now just before an epoch's sun declines
Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee,
Thy son, I have in time returned to thee.
In time, for though the sun is setting on
A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set;
Though late, O soil, it is not too late yet
To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone,
Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone.
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Song of the Son
O Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums,
Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air,
Passing before they stripped the old tree bare
One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes
An everlasting song, a singing tree,
Caroling softly souls of slavery,
What they were, and what they are to me,
Caroling softly souls of slavery.
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Reapers
Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones
Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones
In their hip-pockets as a thing that's done,
And start their silent swinging, one by one.
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,
And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds.
His belly close to ground. I see the blade.
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.
From Cane by Jean Toomer. Copyright © 1923 Boni and Liveright,
renewed 1951 by Jean Toomer. Used with the permission of Liveright
Publishing Corporation.
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Introduction to Cane
LOOKING back on the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920's, the distinguished scholar
and sociologist, Charles S. Johnson, observed that "A brief ten years have developed
more confident self-expression, more widespread efforts in the direction of art than the
long, dreary two centuries before." Recalling the sunburst of Jean Toomer's first
appearance, he added, "Here was triumphantly the Negro artist, detached from
propaganda, sensitive only to beauty. Where [Paul Laurence] Dunbar gave to the
unnamed Negro peasant a reassuring touch of humanity, Toomer gave to the peasant a
passionate charm.... More than artist, he was an experimentalist, and this last quality has
carried him away from what was, perhaps, the most astonishingly brilliant beginning of
any Negro writer of this generation."Cane, the book that provoked this comment, was
published in 1923 after portions of it had appeared earlier in Broom, The Crisis, Double
Dealer, Liberator, Little Review, Modern Review, Nomad, Prairie and S 4 N. But Cane
and its author, let it be said at once, presented an enigma from the start-an enigma
which has, in many ways, deepened in the years since its publication. Given such a
problem, perhaps one may be excused for not wishing to separate completely the man
from his work.
During the summer of 1922 Toomer had sent a batch of unpublished manuscripts to the
editors of the Liberator, Max Eastman and his assistant Claude McKay. They accepted
some of the pieces enthusiastically and requested biographical material from the author.
Toomer responded with the following:
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Langston Hughes
James Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1902, in Joplin,
Missouri. His parents divorced when he was a small child, and his
father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his grandmother until he
was thirteen, when he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his
mother and her husband, eventually settling in Cleveland, Ohio. It
was in Lincoln, Illinois, that Hughes began writing poetry.
Following graduation, he spent a year in Mexico and a year at Columbia University.
During these years, he held odd jobs as an assistant cook, launderer, and a busboy,
and traveled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November 1924, he
moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was
published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926. He finished his college education at Lincoln
University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not without
Laughter, won the Harmon gold medal for literature.
Hughes, who claimed Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as
his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of
black life in America from the twenties through the sixties.
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Langston Hughes
He wrote novels, short stories and plays, as well as poetry, and is also known for his
engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in
Montage of a Dream Deferred. His life and work were enormously important in
shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike
other notable black poets of the period—Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee
Cullen--Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the
common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in
ways that reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love
of music, laughter, and language itself.
Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate前列腺 cancer in May 22,
1967, in New York. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem,
New York City, has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation
Commission, and East 127th Street was renamed "Langston Hughes Place."
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I, Too, Sing America
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed-I, too, am America.
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The Negro Speaks of Rivers
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
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Countee Cullen (1903-1946)
Born in 1903 in New York City, Countee Cullen was raised in a
Methodist parsonage. He attended De Witt Clinton High School in
New York and began writing poetry at the age of fourteen. In 1922,
Cullen entered New York University. His poems were published in
The Crisis, under the leadership of W. E. B. Du Bois, and
Opportunity, a magazine of the National Urban League.
He was soon after published in Harper's, the Century Magazine, and Poetry. He won
several awards for his poem, "Ballad of the Brown Girl," and graduated from New
York University in 1923. That same year, Harper published his first volume of verse,
Color, and he was admitted to Harvard University where he completed a master's
degree.
His second volume of poetry, Copper Sun (1927), met with controversy in the black
community because Cullen did not give the subject of race the same attention he had
given it in Color. He was raised and educated in a primarily white community, and he
differed from other poets of the Harlem Renaissance like Langston Hughes in that he
lacked the background to comment from personal experience on the lives of other
blacks or use popular black themes in his writing. An imaginative lyric poet, he wrote
in the tradition of Keats and Shelley and was resistant to the new poetic techniques of
the Modernists. He died in 1946.
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A Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Color (1925)
Copper Sun (1927)
The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1928)
The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929)
The Medea and Some Other Poems (1935)
On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countee Cullen (1947)
My Soul's High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen (1991)
Prose
One Way to Heaven (1931)
The Lost Zoo (1940) Children's stories.
My Lives and How I Lost Them (1942) Children's stories.
Drama
St. Louis Woman (1946) With Arna Bontemps.
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"Yet Do I Marvel"
I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
（Concise Anthology of American Literature, p1702）
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Richard Wright (1908-1960)
The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed
forever. No matter how much qualifying the book might later
need, it made impossible a repetition of old lies." - Irving Howe
One of America’s greatest black writers, Richard Wright was also
among the first African American writers to achieve literary fame
and fortune, but his reputation has less to do with the color of his
skin than with the superb quality of his work. He was born and
spent the first years of his life on a plantation, not far from
the affluent city of Natchez on the Mississippi River, but his life as the son of an
illiterate sharecropper was far from affluent. Though he spent only a few years of
his life in Mississippi, those years would play a key role in his two most important
works: Native Son, a novel, and his autobiography, Black Boy.
Richard Wright was born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, on September 4,
1908. His father, Nathaniel, was an illiterate sharecropper and his mother, Ella
Wilson, was a well-educated school teacher. The family’s extreme poverty forced
them to move to Memphis when Richard was six years old.
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Richard Wright (1908-1960)
Soon after, his father left the family for another woman and his mother was forced
to work as a cook in order to support the family. Richard briefly stayed in an
orphanage during this period as well. His mother became ill while living in
Memphis, so the family moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and lived with Ella’s mother.
Richard’s grandmother, a devout Seventh Day Adventist, enrolled him in a Seventh
Day Adventist school near Jackson at the age of twelve. He also attended a local
public school for a few years. In the spring of 1924 the Southern Register, a local
black newspaper, printed his first story, “The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre.” From
1925 to 1927, he worked several menial 仆人的jobs in Jackson and Memphis.
During this time he continued writing and discovered the works of H.L. Mencken,
Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis.
In 1927 he moved to Chicago, where he became a Post Office clerk until the Great
Depression forced him to take on various temporary positions. During this time he
became involved with the Communist Party, writing articles and stories for both the
Daily Worker and New Masses. In April 1931 he published his first major story,
“Superstition,” in Abbot’s Monthly. His ties to the Communist Party continued after
moving to New York in 1937.
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Richard Wright (1908-1960)
He became the Harlem editor of the Daily Worker and helped edit a short-lived
literary magazine, New Challenge. In 1938 four of his stories were collected as
Uncle Tom’s Children. He then received a Guggenheim古根海姆Fellowship, which
allowed him to complete his first novel, Native Son (1940). In 1939, he married
Dhimah Rose Meadman, a white dancer, but the two separated shortly thereafter. In
1941, he married Ellen Poplar, a white member of the Communist Party, and they
had two daughters, Julia in 1942 and Rachel in 1949.
In 1944 he broke with the Communist Party but continued to follow liberal
ideologies. After moving to Paris in 1946, Wright became friends with Jean-Paul
Sartre萨特 and Albert Camus加谬 while going through an Existentialist phase best
depicted by his second novel, The Outsiders 局外人(1953). In 1954 he published a
minor novel, Savage Holiday. After becoming a French citizen in 1947, he
continued to travel throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, and these experiences led
to a number of nonfiction works.
In his last years, he was plagued by illness (aerobic dysentary) and financial
hardship. Throughout this period he wrote approximately 4,000 English Haikus俳句
(some of which were recently published for the first time) and another novel, The
Long Dream, in 1958. He also prepared another collection of short stories, Eight
Men, which was published after his death on November 28, 1960.
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Richard Wright (1908-1960)
Among his other works are two autobiographies. Black Boy, published in 1945,
covered his youth in the segregated South, and American Hunger, published
posthumously in 1977, treated his membership and disillusionment with the
Communist Party.
Many of Wright’s works failed to satisfy the rigid standards of the New Criticism,
but his evolution as a writer has interested readers throughout the world. The
importance of his works comes not from his technique and style, but from the
impact his ideas and attitudes have had on American life. Wright is seen as a
seminal figure in the black revolution that followed his earliest novels. Bigger
Thomas, the central figure of Native Son, is a murderer, but his situation galvanized
刺激, 使兴奋, 激励the thought of black leaders toward the desire to confront the
world and help shape the future of their race.
As his vision of the world extended beyond the U.S., his quest for solutions
expanded to include the politics and economics of emerging third world nations.
Wright’s development was marked by an ability to respond to the currents of the
social and intellectual history of his time. His most significant contribution,
however, was his desire to accurately portray blacks to white readers, thereby
destroying the white myth of the patient, humorous, subservient屈从的 black man.
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Fiction
Uncle Tom’s Children: Four Novellas. New York: Harper, 1938.
Uncle Tom’s Children: Five Long Stories. New York: Harper, 1938.
Bright and Morning Star (story). New York: International Publishers, 1938.
Native Son. New York: Harper, 1940.
The Outsider. New York: Harper, 1953.
Savage Holiday. New York: Avon, 1954.
The Long Dream. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1958.
Eight Men (stories). Cleveland and New York: World, 1961.
Lawd Today. New York: Walker, 1963.
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Native Son
Richard Wright’s Native Son is an essential text of AfricanAmerican literature and a great piece of reading. The novel is
the tragic story of Bigger Thomas, a hard-working, honest black
man trying to get by in the white man’s world. When he takes a
job as a chauffeur for a wealthy white family with a left-leaning
college-age daughter, he sees trouble inexplicably coming his
way. How it happens will leave you spellbound出神的, and will
also show how a person with the best intentions can be trapped
in a noose 束缚of race and class.
Native Son's publication history is one of its most revelatory启示的 aspects. After
several novel-projects had failed, Wright sold Native Son to Harper Publishers, netting
a $400 advance预付. Published in 1940, Native Son became a selection of the Book-ofthe-Month club. Ironically, some of the most candid commentary on racism and
communism was censored from the novel in its publication for the Book-of-the-Month
club. Perhaps more ironic is the fact that the novel was featured as a detective story;
Wright's discussions about race and poverty were largely considered to be incidental at
best, if not distracting, or worse. It was not until 1991 that Native Son was printed in its
original form and literary critics and professors alike agreed that the substantial
additions to the novel significantly enhanced its political and literary weight.
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Native Son
Some of the most notable additions can be found in the courtroom scenes of Book
Three. While the outcome of the trial is no different, much of Boris A. Max's
Communist philosophy was restored. Similarly, there is more graphic detail of the
violence of the racist white mob, now including an enhanced portrayal of the Ku
Klux Klan三K党. Finally, the restored details of Bigger's psychology support the
idea that the inmate's final contemplation is spiritually transforming.
The censorship of Native Son speaks to the political context displayed in the novel.
The array of racist, anti-Communists like Britten, the private investigator, and
Buckley, the state prosecutor, reminds one of the political problems that Wright
suffered in the "red scares" of McCarthy-era America. Similarly, the story of
Bigger's family‹their migration and poverty provides the context of the Great
Depression; but more specifically, Native Son focuses on the experiences of
African-Americans and how economic disadvantages are so closely related to and
entwined缠绕 with political subjugation征服. In the novel, Wright essentially
reports his findings, that racist Chicago is little better than the South and northern
blacks are just as impoverished as their southern counterparts.
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Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison’s life began on March 1, 1914 in Oklahoma City,
Oklahoma. Ellison was forced to face hardships as a young
child. He first lost a brother when he was very young. Then in
1917, at the age of three, Ellison’s father died and his mother was
left to raise two young sons. As a child he was influenced by the
western frontier philosophy of America. He viewed our American
nation as a land of “infinite possibilities.”
He did not have to face many racial tensions growing up in the Midwest, this caused
for a culture shock when he witnessed the harshness of the deep south for the first
time. This occurred when he went to school on a scholarship at the Tuskegee
Institute from 1933 to 1936. While at Tuskegee his main interest was found in
music and this was what his career plans were. In the year of 1936 Ellison left the
Tuskegee Institute for the city, New York City. While in the city he met the novelist
Richard Wright and became involved in the Federal Writers Project. During these
times he published many short stories for magazines. His stories appeared in New
Masses and other random periodicals. Next Ellison became the editor of the Negro
Quarterly and soon after began work of his first novel. During his stay in New York
he also took a time off to serve in the Merchant Marine academy in the second World
War. Following is a list of the most famous works, and dates they wore published,
created by this wonderful author during his lifetime.
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Background Information
Ellison gained valuable writing experience while working for the
Federal Writers' Project between 1938 and 1942. Through his work,
he came into close contact with a variety of people and thus became
better adept at producing realistic characters in his writing. Many of
the conversations he recorded he then used when he was writing
The Invisible Man. For instance, Mary Rambo's character advises
the narrator of the novel to not let New York corrupt him. This
quotation is verbatim逐字的 out of his FWP encounters.
Another experience which was later encapsulated压缩 into his novel was his work in
freelance writing. In 1943, he was hired to cover a riot in Harlem. This event provided
the background for the climax of the novel, the race riot, which finally succeeds in
driving the narrator underground in The Invisible Man.
While in the Merchant Marines during World War II, Ellison struggled with writing a
prison camp novel. He contracted a kidney infection and became depressed. He took a
sick leave as the War wound down in 1945 and moved with his wife to recuperate复原
in Vermont. He spent time reading Lord Raglan's The Hero which discusses AfricanAmerican mythical and historical figures. Also influenced by the likes of Sophocles,
Homer, Dostoyevsky, Freud, Jung, Wright, and others, he began to think about black
leaders and wondered why they ignored their constituents but often bent over
backwards for the white man.
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He decided to write a novel about black identity, heroism, and history through the use
of the folklore, spirituals, blues, comedians, archetypes, and personal experiences he
had gathered over the years. One day in 1945, Ellison sat at his typewriter in Vermont,
thinking of an ironic joke he had heard from a black face comedian about his family
becoming so progressively dark in complexion that the new baby's mother could not
even see her. In this vein, he suddenly wrote, "I am an invisible man". He nearly
rejected the idea but was intrigued and decided to give it a try. Ellison then spent
seven years working on the novel, The Invisible Man.
In October of 1947, Ellison published the battle royal chapter as "Invisible Man" in the
British magazine, Horizon. In 1948, he published the same section in the American
magazine, Magazine of the Year. Subsequently, in the early months of 1952, he
published the Prologue of the novel in the Partisan Review. The complete novel was
then published in April of 1952. It received favorable reviews by both white and black
audiences, although it was also met with some negative reviews. Harsh criticism came
from a minority of the Afro-American community who claimed that the novel
displayed contempt toward blacks. The Left also was a harsh critic, finding the novel
to be pretentious and otherworldly. Overall however, the book was greeted positively.
Over the years it has been awarded with numerous accolades赞美, such as the
Russwurm Award, National Book Award, Rockefeller Foundation Award, and Prix de
Rome Fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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James Baldwin
James Arthur Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York City, Aug. 2,
1924 and died on Nov. 30, 1987. He offered a vital literary voice
during the era of civil rights activism in the 1950s and '60s. The
eldest of nine children, his stepfather was a minister. At age 14,
Baldwin became a preacher at the small Fireside Pentecostal Church
in Harlem. After he graduated from high school, he moved to
Greenwich Village.
In the early 1940s, he transferred his faith from religion to literature. Critics, however,
note the impassioned cadences调子 of Black churches are still evident in his writing.
Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), his first novel, is a partially autobiographical account
of his youth. His essay collections [Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My
Name (1961), and The Fire Next Time (1963)] were influential in informing a large
white audience.
From 1948, Baldwin made his home primarily in the south of France, but often
returned to the USA to lecture or teach. In 1957, he began spending half of each year in
New York City. His novels include Giovanni's Room (1956), about a white American
expatriate who must come to terms with his homosexuality, and Another Country
(1962), about racial and gay sexual tensions among New York intellectuals. His
inclusion of gay themes resulted in a lot of savage criticism from the Black community.
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James Baldwin
Eldridge Cleaver, of the Black Panthers黑豹, stated the Baldwin's writing displayed an
"agonizing, total hatred of blacks." Baldwin's play, Blues for Mister Charlie, was
produced in 1964. Going to Meet the Man (1965) and Tell Me How Long the Train's
Been Gone (1968) provided powerful descriptions of American racism. As an openly
gay man, he became increasingly outspoken in condemning discrimination against
lesbian and gay people.
Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)
The Amen Corner (play, 1965)
Works by James Baldwin
Notes of a Native Son (1955)
Giovanni's Room (1956)
Nobody Knows My Name (1961)
Another Country (1962)
The Fire Next Time (1963)
Blues for Mister Charlie (play, 1964)
Going to Meet the Man (1965)
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968)
No Name in the Street (1972)
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Go Tell It on the Mountain
In Go Tell It on the Mountain, author James Baldwin describes the course of the
fourteenth birthday of John Grimes in Harlem, 1935. Baldwin also uses extended
flashback episodes to recount the lives of John's parents and aunt and to link this
urban boy in the North to his slave grandmother in an earlier South. The first
section follows John's thoughts, the second mostly his aunt’s, the third his father’s,
the fourth his mother’s and the fifth again mostly John's.
The title Go Tell It on the Mountain comes from a Negro spiritual. The novel is
steeped in the language of the King James Bible, and the Bible is a constant
presence in the characters' lives; thus, a familiarity with Biblical stories can
enhance the reader's understanding of the text. At the heart of the story three main
conflicts intertwine: a clash between father and son, a coming-of-age struggle, and
a religious crisis. Baldwin deals with issues of race and racism more elliptically in
this novel than in his other works, but these issues inform all three of the text's
central problems--indeed, according to some critics, these issues take center stage
in the book, though subtly.
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Go Tell It on the Mountain
John doesn't understand why his father hates him, reserving
his love for John's younger brother Roy instead. He is torn
between his desire to win his father's love and his hatred
for his father (and the strict religious world this man
represents). The boy believes himself to have committed
the first major sin of his life--a belief that helps precipitate
a religious crisis. Before the night is over John will
undergo a religious transformation, experiencing salvation
on the "threshing-floor" of his family's storefront Harlem
church. Yet this will not earn him his father's love. What
John does not know, but the reader does, is that the man he
thinks is his father--Gabriel--is, in fact, his stepfather;
unbeknownst to John, Gabriel's resentment of him has
nothing to do with himself and everything to do with
Gabriel's own concealed past.
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Another Country
Synopsis: Opening with the unforgettable character of Rufus
Scott, a scavenging Harlem jazz musician adrift in New York,
it draws us into a Bohemian underworld of writers and artists
as they betray, love and test each other - men and women, men
and men, black and white - to the limit.
First lines: He was facing Seventh Avenue, at Times Square.
It was past midnight and he had been sitting in the movies, in
the top row of the balcony, since two o'clock in the afternoon.
Twice he had been awakened by the violent accents of the
Italian film, once the usher had awakened him, and twice he
had been awakened by caterpillar fingers between his thighs. He was so tired, he had
fallen so low, that he scarcely had the energy to be angry; nothing of his belonged to
him anymore - you took the best, so why not take the rest? - but he had growled in his
sleep and bared the white teeth in his dark face and crossed his legs. Then the balcony
was nearly empty, the Italian film was approaching a climax; he stumbled down the
endless stairs into the street. He was hungry, his mouth felt filthy. He realised too late,
as he passed through the doors, that he wanted to urinate. And he was broke. And he
had nowhere to go.
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Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones)
Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey,
on October 7, 1934. His father, Colt LeRoy Jones, was a postal
supervisor; Anna Lois Jones, his mother, was a social worker. He
attended Rutgers University for two years, then transferred to
Howard University, where in 1954 he earned his B.A. in English.
He served in the Air Force from 1954 until 1957, then moved to the
Lower East Side of Manhattan. There he joined a loose circle of
Greenwich Village artists, musicians, and writers.
The following year he married Hettie Cohen and began co-editing the avant-garde
literary magazine Yugen with her. That year he also founded Totem Press, which first
published works by Allen Ginsbere, Jack Kerouac, and others.
He published his first volume of poetry, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, in
1961. From 1961 to 1963 he was co-editor, with Diane Di Prima, of The Floating Bear,
a literary newsletter. His increasing hostility toward and mistrust of white society was
reflected in two plays, The Slave and The Toilet, both written in 1962. 1963 saw the
publication of Blues People: Negro Music in White America, which he wrote, and The
Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, which he edited and introduced.
His reputation as a playwright was established with the production of Dutchman at the
Cherry Lane Theatre in New York on March 24, 1964.
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Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones)
The controversial play subsequently won an Obie Award (for "best off-Broadway play")
and was made into a film.
In 1965, following the assassination of Malcolm X, Jones repudiated批判 his former
life and ended his marriage. He moved to Harlem, where he founded the Black Arts
Repertory Theatre/School由固定剧团演出保留剧目的剧场. The company, which
produced plays that were often anti-white and intended for a black audience, dissolved
解散 in a few months. He moved back to Newark, and in 1967 he married AfricanAmerican poet Sylvia Robinson (now known as Amina Baraka). That year he also
founded the Spirit House Players, which produced, among other works, two of Baraka's
plays against police brutality: Police and Arm Yrself or Harm Yrself.
In 1968, he co-edited Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing with Larry
Neal and his play Home on the Range was performed as a benefit for the Black Panther
party. That same year he became a Muslim, changing his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka.
("Imamu" means "spiritual leader.") He assumed leadership of his own black Muslim
organization, Kawaida. From 1968 to 1975, Baraka was chairman of the Committee for
Unified Newark, a black united front organization. In 1969 , his Great Goodness of Life
became part of the successful "Black Quartet" off-Broadway, and his play Slave Ship
was widely reviewed.
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Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones)
Baraka was a founder and chairman of the Congress of African People, a national PanAfricanist organization with chapters in 15 cities, and he was one of the chief organizers
of the National Black Political Convention, which convened in Gary, Indiana, in 1972
to organize a more unified political stance for African-Americans.
In 1974 Baraka adopted a Marxist Leninist philosophy and dropped the spiritual title
"Imamu." In 1983, he and Amina Baraka edited Confirmation: An Anthology of AfricanAmerican Women, which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus
Foundation, and in 1987 they published The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues. The
Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka was published in 1984.
Amiri Baraka's numerous literary prizes and honors include fellowships from the
Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/Faulkner
Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, the Langston Hughes Award
from The City College of New York, and a lifetime achievement award from the Before
Columbus Foundation. He has taught poetry at the New School for Social Research in
New York, literature at the University of Buffalo, and drama at Columbia University.
He has also taught at San Francisco State University, Yale University and George
Washington University.
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A Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note (1961)
The Dead Lecturer (1964)
Black Art (1969)
Black Magic: Collected Poetry 1961-1967 (1969)
It's Nation Time (1970)
Spirit Reach (1972)
Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979)
The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (1991) ed. William J. Harris
Wise Why's Y's: The Griot's Tale (1995)
Transbluesency: The Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones (1961-1995)
Funk Lore: New Poems (1984-1995) (1996)
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Alex Haley (1921-1992)
The author of the widely acclaimed novel Roots was born
in Ithaca, New York on August 11, 1921, and reared in
Henning, Tennessee. The oldest of three sons of a college
professor father and a mother who taught grade school,
Haley graduated from high school at fifteen and attended
college for two years before enlisting in the United States
Coast Guard as a messboy in 1939.
A voracious贪婪的 reader, Haley began writing short stories while working at sea, but
it took eight years before small magazines began accepting some of his stories. By 1952,
the Coast Guard had created a new rating for Haley, chief journalist, and he began
handling United States Coast Guard public relations. In 1959, after 20 years of military
service, he retired from the Coast Guard and launched
a new career as a freelance writer. He eventually
became an assignment writer for Reader's Digest and
moved on to Playboy where he initiated the "Playboy
Interviews" feature.
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The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
One of the personalities Haley interviewed was Malcolm X-- an
interview that inspired Haley's first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm
X (1965). Translated into eight languages, the book has sold more than 6
million copies. Pursuing the few slender clues of oral family history told
him by his maternal grandmother in Tennessee, Haley spent the next 12
years traveling three continents tracking his maternal family back to a
Mandingo youth, named Kunta Kinte, who was kidnaped into slavery
from the small village of Juffure, in The Gambia, West Africa.
"Through a life of passion and struggle, he became one of the most influential figures of
the 20th Century. In this riveting account, he tells of his journey from a prison cell to
Mecca, describing his transition from hoodlum to Muslim minister. Here, the man who
called himself "the angriest Black man in America" relates how his conversion to true
Islam helped him confront his rage and recognize the brotherhood of all mankind. An
established classic of modern America, The Autobiography of Malcolm X was hailed
by the New York Times as "Extraordinary. A brilliant, painful, important book." Still
extraordinary, still important, this electrifying story has transformed Malcom X's life
into his legacy. The strength of his words, the power of his ideas continue to resonate
more than a generation after they first appeared."
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Roots
It begins with a child's birth in Africa. His parents name him Kunta
Kinte, a strong, proud boy who later in life is kidnapped and taken to
America to be sold into slavery. Roots follows his clan through seven
generations, ending with Alex Haley himself. The book tells, in
fascinating detail, the lives of Kunta Kinte, Kizzy Waller, "Chicken
George" Lea, Tom Murray, Will Palmer, Simon Alexander Haley, and
finally, the author. Throughout the book, African culture, as well as the
culture of Americanized slaves, is introduced.
Haley's book stimulated interest in Africa and in black genealogy家谱. The United
States Senate passed a resolution paying tribute to Haley and comparing Roots to Uncle
Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe in the 1850s. The book received many awards,
including the National Book Award for 1976 special citation of merit in history and a
special Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for making an important contribution to the literature of
slavery. Roots was not without its critics, however. A 1977 lawsuit brought by Margaret
Walker charged that Roots plagiarized her novel Jubilee. Another author, Harold
Courlander also filed a suit charging that Roots plagiarized his novel The African.
Courlander received a settlement after several passages in Roots were found to be
almost verbatim逐字的 from The African. Haley claimed that researchers helping him
had given him this material without citing the source.
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Roots
Haley received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1977. Four thousand deans and
department heads of colleges and universities throughout the country in a survey
conducted by Scholastic Magazine selected Haley as America's foremost achiever in the
literature category. (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.was selected in the religious category.)
The ABC-TV network presented another series, Roots: The Next Generation, in
February 1979 (also written by Haley). Roots had sold almost five million copies by
December 1978 and had been reprinted in 23 languages. In 1988, Haley conducted a
promotional tour for a novella titled A Different Kind of Christmas about slave escapes
in the 1850s. He also promoted a drama, Roots: The Gift, a two-hour television program
shown in December 1988. This story revolved around two principal characters from
Roots who are involved in a slave break for freedom on Christmas Eve. When Roots
appeared in 1976 it gained critical and popular success, although the truth and
originality of the book faced criticism. James Baldwin considered in his New York
Times review, that Roots suggest how each of us are vehicle of the history which have
produced us. On the other side - representing a minority opinion - Michael Arled
viewed the book and television series as Haley's own fantasies about 'going home.'The
story starts from Juffure, a small peaceful village in West Africa in 1750. It ends in
Gambia, in the same village, after several generations.
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Roots
Haley depicts realistically his ancestor's life - the villagers suffered occasionally from
shortage of food. "But Kunta and the others, being yet little children, paid less attention
to the hunger pangs in their bellies than to playing in the mud, wrestling each other and
sliding on their naked bottoms. Yet in their longing to see the sun again, they would
wave up at the slate-colored sky and shout - as they had seen their parents do - 'Shine,
sun, and I will kill you a goat!'" Haley doesn't imagine that it is possible to return to
some Paradise. In Juffure, among the villages, he realizes in shock that the color of his
skin is much lighter than theirs. Skeptics claimed that the griot, Kebba Kanji Fofana, an
old man, was a well-known trickster and told Haley just what he wanted to hear.
However, Haley donated money to the village for a new mosque. He had also founded
in the early 1970s with his brothers the Kinte Foundation to collection and preservation
of African-American genealogy records.
Selected Books
by Alex Haley
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Roots
•The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
•Marva Collins' Way
•Alex Haley's Queen: The Story of an American Family
•Climbing Your Family Tree: Online and Off-line Genealogy for Kids
•A Different Kind of Christmas
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