Attaway, William | Phillip H. Vaughan (essay date 1975)
Phillip H. Vaughan (essay date 1975)
SOURCE: "From Pastoralism to Industrial Antipathy in William Attaway's Blood on the Forge," in Phylon: The Atlantic University Review of Race and Culture, Vol. XXXVI, No. 4, 1975, pp. 422-25.
[In the following essay, Vaughan states that in Blood on the Forge "Attaway rejects the traditional forms of agrarianism which call for a return to nature, and sounds the theme of alienation that marks the modern existential novel."]
When Blood on the Forge by black novelist William Attaway was published in 1941, it received little notice. The book, nevertheless, represented a literary achievement in its own right, and at the same time it realistically portrays the transition of a people from a structured authoritarian, rural existence to an industrialized urban frontier (Attaway himself was a part of that northward migration of blacks—coming from rural Mississippi to Chicago). On the one...
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