Attaway, William - James O. Young (essay date 1973)
James O. Young (essay date 1973)
SOURCE: "Black Reality and Beyond," in Black Writers of the Thirties, Louisiana State University Press, 1973, pp. 203-35.
[Young is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he examines Blood on the Forge as an example of proletarian fiction.]
In his eloquent novel, Blood on the Forge (1941), William Attaway delved into the history of the black man in America. But, like Richard Wright in his folk history of the migration, instead of dramatizing the exploits of a historic race hero, Attaway looked with the scrutiny of a sociologist at the brutal experience of the mass of blacks who migrated from the agrarian South into the industrial North at the time of the First World War. Like [Arna Bontemps'] Black Thunder, Attaway's novel should be classed as proletarian fiction. In fact, the general structure of the novel conformed more closely to the typical proletarian novel...
[The entire page is 1417 words long]
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