The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960

by Lawrence P. Jackson

Overview

Recovering the lost history of a crucial era in African American literature

The Indignant Generation is the first narrative history of the neglected but essential period of African American literature between the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights era. The years between these two indispensable epochs saw the communal rise of Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and many other influential black writers. While these individuals have been duly celebrated, little attention has been paid to the political and artistic milieu in which they produced their greatest works. With this commanding study, Lawrence Jackson recalls the lost history of a crucial era.

Looking at the tumultuous decades surrounding World War II, Jackson restores the "indignant" quality to a generation of African American writers shaped by Jim Crow segregation, the Great Depression, the growth of American communism, and an international wave of decolonization. He also reveals how artistic collectives in New York, Chicago, and Washington fostered a sense of destiny and belonging among diverse and disenchanted peoples. As Jackson shows through contemporary documents, the years that brought us Their Eyes Were Watching God, Native Son, and Invisible Man also saw the rise of African American literary criticism—by both black and white critics.

Fully exploring the cadre of key African American writers who triumphed in spite of segregation, The Indignant Generation paints a vivid portrait of American intellectual and artistic life in the mid-twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691157894
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/31/2013
Pages:	600
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Lawrence P. Jackson is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and History at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius, My Father's Name: A Black Virginia Family after the Civil War, and Chester B. Himes: A Biography.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Irredeemable Promise: The Bittersweet Career of J. Saunders Redding 1

Chapter One: Three Swinging Sisters: Harlem, Howard, and the South Side (1934-1936) 15

Chapter Two: The Black Avant-Garde between Left and Right (1935-1939) 42

Chapter Three: A New Kind of Challenge (1936-1939) 68

Chapter Four: The Triumph of Chicago Realism (1938-1940) 93

Chapter Five: Bigger Thomas among the Liberals (1940-1943) 123

Chapter Six: Friends in Need of Negroes: Bucklin Moon and Thomas Sancton (1942-1945) 149

Chapter Seven: "Beating That Boy": White Writers, Critics, Editors, and the Liberal Arts Coalition (1944-1949) 178

Chapter Eight: Afroliberals and the End of World War II (1945-1946) 196

Chapter Nine: Black Futilitarianists and the Welcome Table (1945-1947) 219

Chapter Ten: The Peril of Something New, or, the Decline of Social Realism (1947-1948) 258

Chapter Eleven: The Negro New Liberal Critic and the Big Little Magazine (1948-1949) 275

Chapter Twelve: The Communist Dream of African American Modernism (1947-1950) 297

Chapter Thirteen: The Insinuating Poetics of the Mainstream (1949-1950) 323

Chapter Fourteen: Still Looking for Freedom (1949-1954) 342

Chapter Fifteen: The Expatriation: The Price of Brown and the New Bohemians (1952-1955) 379

Chapter Sixteen: Liberal Friends No More: The Rubble of White Patronage (1956-1958) 411

Chapter Seventeen: The End of the Negro Writer (1955-1960) 444

Chapter Eighteen: The Reformation of Black New Liberals (1958-1960) 470

Chapter Nineteen: Prometheus Unbound (1958-1960) 485

Notes 511

Index 559

What People are Saying About This

Werner Sollors

This is a landmark work in the history of African American studies and American intellectual history. Writing with verve, Jackson brings to life a large cast of characters and traces an ongoing conversation among the writers and critics of this period. This book is likely to become a model for a new generation of scholars, both for the breadth of its engagement and the depth of its archival research.
— Werner Sollors, Harvard University

David Levering Lewis

Lawrence Jackson's authoritatively detailed and lively Indignant Generation is an omnium gatherum of virtually everybody of color in the mid-twentieth century who tried to write the Great American Novel. This excellent study should become a literary and cultural history benchmark.
— David Levering Lewis, New York University and author of "When Harlem Was in Vogue"

Maxwell

The Indignant Generation is a massively well-researched narrative history of African American writing from the Great Depression through the first wave of the nonviolent Civil Rights movement. Jackson's inclusive and often fresh detail promises to install his work as a standard reference on African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century.
— William J. Maxwell, Washington University in St. Louis

Gerald Early

The Indignant Generation is a thoroughly researched, highly informative, and remarkably important African American literary study about a neglected period of black creative writing. It fills some very important holes in black literary history, and all of us who work in literature are grateful that Jackson has taken on this task and done it so well.
— Gerald Early, series editor of Best African American Fiction and Best African American Essays

Cornel West

This is a magisterial book. Lawrence Jackson is a first-rate historian—I salute him!
— Cornel West, Princeton University

From the Publisher

"Lawrence Jackson's authoritatively detailed and lively Indignant Generation is an omnium gatherum of virtually everybody of color in the mid-twentieth century who tried to write the Great American Novel. This excellent study should become a literary and cultural history benchmark."—David Levering Lewis, author of W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

"The Indignant Generation is the most comprehensive portrait of the literary history in that glorious interregnum between the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and the Black Arts Movement of the sixties. Combining close reading with a keen sensitivity to cultural and political context, Jackson has brought this little-studied period to life, and he has done so with compelling erudition. This book is a major contribution to literary scholarship. I learned quite a lot reading it, and enjoyed every minute doing so."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

"This is a magisterial book. Lawrence Jackson is a first-rate historian—I salute him!"—Cornel West, Princeton University

"The Indignant Generation is a thoroughly researched, highly informative, and remarkably important African American literary study about a neglected period of black creative writing. It fills some very important holes in black literary history, and all of us who work in literature are grateful that Jackson has taken on this task and done it so well."—Gerald Early, series editor of Best African American Fiction and Best African American Essays

"This is a landmark work in the history of African American studies and American intellectual history. Writing with verve, Jackson brings to life a large cast of characters and traces an ongoing conversation among the writers and critics of this period. This book is likely to become a model for a new generation of scholars, both for the breadth of its engagement and the depth of its archival research."—Werner Sollors, Harvard University

"The Indignant Generation is a massively well-researched narrative history of African American writing from the Great Depression through the first wave of the nonviolent Civil Rights movement. Jackson's inclusive and often fresh detail promises to install his work as a standard reference on African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century."—William J. Maxwell, Washington University in St. Louis

Henry Louis Gates

The Indignant Generation is the most comprehensive portrait of the literary history in that glorious interregnum between the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and the Black Arts Movement of the sixties. Combining close reading with a keen sensitivity to cultural and political context, Jackson has brought this little-studied period to life, and he has done so with compelling erudition. This book is a major contribution to literary scholarship. I learned quite a lot reading it, and enjoyed every minute doing so.
— Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

Editorial Reviews

"Winner of the 2012 Book Award, College Language Association"

Winner of the 2012 Literary Award for Nonfiction, Black Caucus of the American Library Association, Inc.

Winner of the 2011 PROSE Award in Literature, Association of American Publishers

Finalist for the 2011 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction, The Hurston/Wright Foundation

Finalist for the 2011 National Book Award, Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change, University of Memphis

Winner of the 2010 William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Modern Language Association

From the Publisher

"Ambitious. . . . Rich with photos and well written, the book merits praise for the deserved attention it brings to the rise of African American criticism and intellectualism and to the many important people who figured in the rise of better-known novelists."

Choice

African-American writers had plenty to be indignant about during the middle decades of the 20th century. . . . Lawrence P. Jackson surveys the era with clarity and perception. Focusing on the literary hubs of Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C., the book captures the complexities of the period, the great hope and skepticism its black writers engendered.

Chicago Reader - Steve Bogira

The Indignant Generation is a must-read for scholars of American culture on both sides of the Atlantic. . . . Jackson's book is invaluable for its historiographic, hermeneutic, and literary merits.

American Studies - Sieglinde Lemke

Jackson's formulation of the indignant generation is a prodigious contribution to African American literary history.

Journal of American Studies - Andrew M. Fearnley

[This] exhaustive compilation—covering from the well-known writers to the little recognized—traverses the journeys of the artists and their links in the hubs of Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C.

Chicago Sun-Times - Maudlyne Ihejirika

African-American writers had plenty to be indignant about during the middle decades of the 20th century. . . . Lawrence P. Jackson surveys the era with clarity and perception. Focusing on the literary hubs of Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C., the book captures the complexities of the period, the great hope and skepticism its black writers engendered.
— Steve Bogira

Chicago Reader

The Indignant Generation is a must-read for scholars of American culture on both sides of the Atlantic. . . . Jackson's book is invaluable for its historiographic, hermeneutic, and literary merits.
— Sieglinde Lemke

American Studies

Jackson's formulation of the indignant generation is a prodigious contribution to African American literary history.
— Andrew M. Fearnley

Journal of American Studies

[This] exhaustive compilation—covering from the well-known writers to the little recognized—traverses the journeys of the artists and their links in the hubs of Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C.
— Maudlyne Ihejirika

Chicago Sun-Times

"[Jackson's] encyclopedic book offers a chronological, old-fashioned history of literature, covering a period desperately in need of thorough-going research and detail, and presents a deeply documented, dense but thoroughly readable account. . . . Jackson's detail may offer more than the casual sightseer seeks, but scholars will rely upon and mine his monumental work and the prodigious research upon which it is based. It should guide the way African-American and American literature is studied."

Publishers Weekly