Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Senghor, Léopold Sédar - Janet G. Vaillant （essay date 1990）

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Janet G. Vaillant （essay date 1990）

SOURCE: “Coming of Age,” in Black, French, and African: A Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Harvard University Press, 1990, pp. 117-46.

[In the following excerpt, Vaillant discusses the significance of Senghor's formative years in France and his early poetry.]

On the eve of World War II, Tours was a calm little town in the Loire Valley slightly to the south and west of Paris. The people of the region were known as bon vivants, lovers of good food and wine. They were sunny, like their rich and fertile countryside. Tours is, and was when Senghor arrived, a town typical of provincial France and the French heartland. Senghor particularly enjoyed the fact that it had been a Roman settlement, Cesarodunum, and remained rich in signs of its Roman and early Christian history. It encompassed, therefore, all he thought best in French culture.

In the fall of 1935, the forty-four children who arrived...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Newsweek （review date 27 July 1964）
   2. Gwendolyn Brooks （review date 13 September 1964）
   3. Robert W. July （review date 25 October 1964）
   4. O. R. Dathorne （essay date 1974）
   5. Lilyan Kesteloot （essay date 1974）
   6. Frederick Ivor Case （essay date 1975）
   7. Janis L. Pallister （essay date April 1980）
   8. Dorothy S. Blair （essay date 1984）
   9. Janet G. Vaillant （essay date 1990）
   10. Roger Shattuck and Samba Ka （review date 20 December 1990）
   11. K. Anthony Appiah （review date 5 July 1992）
   12. Isaac I. Elimimian （essay date 1994）
   13. Koffi Anyinefa （essay date Summer 1996）
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. African Literature