The Indignant Generation : : A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 / / Lawrence P. Jackson.

• VerfasserIn: Jackson, Lawrence P.,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2021]; ©2010
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (600 p.) :; 60 halftones.

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction Irredeemable Promise: The Bittersweet Career of J. Saunders Redding -- Chapter One Three Swinging Sisters: Harlem, Howard, and the South Side (1934-1936) -- Chapter Two The Black Avant-Garde between Left and Right (1935-1939) -- Chapter Three A New Kind of Challenge (1936-1939) -- Chapter Four The Triumph of Chicago Realism (1938-1940) -- Chapter Five Bigger Thomas among the Liberals (1940-1943) -- Chapter Six Friends in Need of Negroes: Bucklin Moon and Thomas Sancton (1942-1945) -- Chapter Seven "Beating That Boy": White Writers, Critics, Editors, and the Liberal Arts Coalition (1944-1949) -- Chapter Eight Afroliberals and the End of World War II (1945-1946) -- Chapter Nine Black Futilitarianists and the Welcome Table (1945-1947) -- Chapter Ten The Peril of Something New, or, the Decline of Social Realism (1947-1948) -- Chapter Eleven The Negro New Liberal Critic and the Big Little Magazine (1948-1949) -- Chapter Twelve The Communist Dream of African American Modernism (1947-1950) -- Chapter Thirteen The Insinuating Poetics of the Mainstream (1949-1950) -- Chapter Fourteen Still Looking for Freedom (1949-1954) -- Chapter Fifteen The Expatriation: The Price of Brown and the New Bohemians (1952-1955) -- Chapter Sixteen Liberal Friends No More: The Rubble of White Patronage (1956-1958) -- Chapter Seventeen The End of the Negro Writer (1955-1960) -- Chapter Eighteen The Reformation of Black New Liberals (1958-1960) -- Chapter Nineteen Prometheus Unbound (1958-1960) -- Notes -- Index