Webb, Frank J. | R. F. Bogardus (essay date summer 1974)
R. F. Bogardus (essay date summer 1974)
SOURCE: Bogardus, R. F. “Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends: An Early Black Novelist's Venture Into Realism.” Studies in Black Literature 5, no. 2 (summer 1974): 15-20.
[In the following essay, Bogardus maintains that Webb's The Garies and Their Friends transcends popular nineteenth-century melodramatic literary conventions to become a sophisticated literary exercise in social realism.]
In The Negro Novel in America, Robert A. Bone asserts that the black American writer remained tied to romanticism until the 1920's.1 That view is largely true and, as such, only partly misleading. But Bone's opinion that Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends2 is exclusively a Negro shopkeeper's melodrama is not merely misleading, it is wrongheaded.3 On the contrary, a sensitive reading of Webb's novel within the context of nineteenth...
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