Mid-Twentieth-Century Literature

Although many Harlem Renaissance writers brought widespread attention to black achievements in literature, most were tied to that very specific period of artistic outpouring in the 1920s, even the ones like Langston Hughes who continued to write prolifically afterward. The Great Depression in the 1930s marked a decisive break: after the end of the Renaissance black writers had to remap the future, and although some writers like Hurston produced their finest work during that decade, it is widely considered a building period for the two decades that followed. Beginning in 1940 a new phenomenon altered the trajectory of African American literature in the mid-twentieth century: literary fame. Although Harlem Renaissance writers had gained a good deal of notoriety, their recognition was more collective than individual, with the possible exception of Hughes and DuBois. Many of Hughes’s contemporaries faded when the Renaissance ended, some (such as Toomer and Larsen) having produced very little, and others (notably Hurston) disappearing from public view in the 1930s and 1940s. The writers who followed them were regarded in a much more intense spotlight. In 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks became the first black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize. In 1952 Ralph Ellison’s weighty novel Invisible Man won the National Book Award. In 1959 Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun debuted on Broadway and was the first play by a black author to win the New York Drama Critics’ Best Play of the Year award. With this fame came an unprecedented artistic blossoming. More than ever before, the writers in this tradition were willing to flout convention and to write works that followed Hughes’s prescription in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain:” they could only become free when they felt confident enough to write out of intuition and artistic conviction rather than in response to the constraining demands of their audiences. In short, more than ever before, individual African American writers dictated their own terms. The emergence of three major experimental and iconoclastic black authors in

the mid-twentieth century brought African American fiction to new heights.

Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin were all public figures who frequently retreated from their fame into exile in order to get their writing done. Wright and Baldwin were expatriates who converged (and clashed) in Paris in the 1940s. Wright remained there until his early death in 1960, while Baldwin shuttled back and forth from France and Turkey to the United States as what he called a “transatlantic commuter” throughout the turbulent period of the Civil Rights Movement and its aftermath. Ellison, after publishing Invisible Man in 1952, undisputedly one of the most important and influential novels in the African American tradition, was so overwhelmed by the attention his book received that he struggled, and failed, to follow it up with the novel his public demanded before his death in 1994. Although certainly not the only black writers at the time, Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin collectively demonstrate both the growing attention given to black writers in the mid-twentieth century and the personal costs such notoriety brought. These three writers were both heirs to the Harlem Renaissance and critics of it.

They might productively be regarded as three very different writers who had one thing in common: a willingness to regard the past critically and skeptically, or to recognize the achievements of their predecessors while refusing to worship them. All three wrote non-fiction as well as fiction (and Baldwin also wrote plays, poetry, and a number of works that are difficult to classify). Their non-fiction is marked by sharp analysis of history, culture, and literature. Baldwin was particularly willing to do battle with the literary establishment. His infamous critiques of Wright and of Langston Hughes (as well as white authors including Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Faulkner, and Norman Mailer) demonstrated his brashness and fearlessness. Ellison, in his essay “The World and the Jug” (1963), spoke back harshly to the prominent critic Irving Howe, who had criticized him and Baldwin while praising Wright. Wright himself, a dedicated Marxist, found fault with writers who supported bourgeois values, including many Harlem Renaissance authors who had preceded him. This combativeness may seem distracting from the actual literature these authors produced, but they drew strength from it and, despite Ellison’s extreme case of writer’s block, they managed to produce a substantial body of highly original work unprecedented in the African American tradition. Wright, Baldwin, and Ellison in the area of prose, and Gwendolyn Brooks,

Robert Hayden, and Margaret Walker in poetry, were only the brightest stars in a new constellation of black writers who commanded attention. This mid-century fame may be attributable to a number of factors: a changing literary scene, the maturing of the tradition, the efforts and ambition of a talented group of writers, or the radical changes taking place in black America that culminated in the Civil Rights Movement. The 1950s in particular was a decade of public demonstration and legal wrangling over the rights of African Americans. Although this political action had been ongoing since the Reconstruction, there was a new urgency to it in the 1950s. The landmark desegregation case of Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education in 1954 marked the end of legal segregation and of Jim Crow laws that had become firmly entrenched in southern society. Despite this important legal victory, the struggle for civil rights and the harmonious society that should have

accompanied this change was far from over in the mid-1950s. The year after Brown v. Topeka, a fourteen-year-old black boy named Emmett Till was brutally murdered in Mississippi for allegedly flirting with a white woman. This tragic event was both a catalyst and a caution: the movement toward racial equality was from that point unstoppable, but the fear of fierce violence weighed it down. Through all of the turbulence, the voices of black writers became crucial, especially prior to the national emergence of prominent black political leaders (Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.) in the 1950s and 1960s. In general, the enduring African American literature of the 1940s and 1950s was

urban, with much of it set in either Chicago or New York. Unlike Harlem Renaissance works, this body of literature tended to focus almost exclusively on urban blight rather than on the opportunities cities might afford. The most prominent feature of black life in the mid-twentieth century as reflected in this literature is poverty, and the limitations to opportunity that coincide with such poverty. There is a deep, tragic strain here: characters, speakers, and narrators in these works struggle to survive in a stingy, hostile world, and they must cope with the knowledge that their lofty dreams only serve to make that struggle more painful.