Attaway, William - L. Moody Simms, Jr. (essay date Spring 1975)
L. Moody Simms, Jr. (essay date Spring 1975)
SOURCE: "In the Shadow of Richard Wright: William Attaway," in Notes on Mississippi Writers, Vol. VIII, No. 1, Spring, 1975, pp. 13-18.
[In the following excerpt, Simms favorably appraises Attaway's portrayal of the disenfranchised in his two novels.]
Undoubtedly, Mississippi's best known native-born black writer is Richard Wright. Wright's reputation, which has grown steadily since the publication of his Native Son in 1940, is justly deserved. Yet over the years, Wright's achievement has tended to overshadow and obscure the work of other Mississippi-born black writers. One of them whose work deserves to be better known is William Attaway. His Blood on the Forge (1941) is an excellent novel which stands up well when compared with any other fiction dealing with blacks written during the past three decades….
Attaway's first novel, Let Me Breathe Thunder, appeared in...
[The entire page is 1552 words long]
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