SOURCE: Rodgers, Lawrence R. “Richard Wright, Frank Marshall Davis and the Chicago Renaissance.” Langston Hughes Review 14, no. 1-2 (spring-fall 1996): 4-12.

[In the following essay, Rodgers presents a brief overview of the Chicago Renaissance, especially comparing the differences and similarities between its two best-known authors, Richard Wright and Frank Marshall Davis.]

Of the many similarities between Frank Marshall Davis and his more celebrated contemporary Richard Wright, one in particular stands out. Both men were products of the Great Migration, the epic rearrangement of African American culture that saw over six million black southerners leave their homes for Northern and Midwestern border cities between 1916 and the early 1960s. Wright spent his childhood in the Mississippi Delta, miles away from Davis' boyhood home of Arkansas City, Kansas, but despite the distance, they would later record similar frustrations about the lack of opportunity, the general sense of deprivation, and the prejudice each of them faced growing up. When both of them eventually made their way to Chicago where they settled during the 1930s, they took up writing careers that similarly relied on filtering their artistic visions through the veil of their oppression-filled pasts. None of the day-to-day events of their boyhoods did anything for either Wright or Davis in helping to prepare them for their careers as writers, except, ironically, to provide a kind of fury borne of memory that frequently found its way into each man's prose and poetry and led to some of their most memorable words. Having met at the National Negro Congress, they became friends in April of 1936 when both of them joined the South Side Writers' Group, a Chicago literary club of twenty or so writers who met to read and discuss each other's work. Although Wright was the group's principal leader, he was also a literary newcomer. Davis, having arrived in Chicago from Atlanta, was already an editor for the Associated Negro Press, and as an established professional writer, he was one of the group's “elder” members (Fabre 128).¹

From this common foundation both men made their mark on the Chicago literary scene. Their shared bitterness about American race relations made the leftist ideology and literary naturalism of the 1930s especially appealing artistic vehicles, and for a time Davis was, like Wright, a willing disciple of the era's proletarian agenda. In 1935 Wright joined the League of American Writers, one of the most radical and celebrated of the decade's anti-fascist artistic organizations; one year later, probably at Wright's recommendation, Davis joined as well (Livin' 245-46). They were both polemicists who took to heart W. E. B. DuBois' often-quoted proclamation that “all Art is propaganda and ever must be” (1000). Davis joined Wright in penning any number of quotable lines reflecting his frustration with racial conditions: “For being black,” he wrote, “In my America / Is no rendezvous with Venus.” In the concluding poem of I Am the American Negro, he opens “Frank Marshall Davis: Writer” by quoting a “they” who maintains that “He is bitter / A bitter bitter / Cynic.”² Although such lines may tempt us to envision Davis as a willing extension of the Wright school of protest, such a characterization, despite some obvious affinities, does the poet injustice. Despite their similar backgrounds, Davis and Wright approached their art from interestingly disparate angles, allowing them to arrive at some significantly different conclusions about the racial worlds they inhabited. These conclusions are to be recognized, especially, in their respective depictions of the city of Chicago, which Wright expressed primarily through his most famous novel Native Son and the second half of his autobiography American Hunger, and Davis conveyed through his poetry and through his autobiography, Livin' the Blues.

Wright's 1940 Native Son is the most pronounced example of what one contemporary reviewer, summing up the black novelists of the age, called the “spirit of defeat” that permeated their fiction. This view is well in keeping with the central intellectual imperatives of an era that Robert Bone and others have recently come to label “the Chicago Renaissance” (449). When considered as a unified moment in African American literary life, the Chicago Renaissance represents a significant artistic movement, arguably of equal proportion to Harlem's a decade earlier. Allying themselves in various ways with the sociological Zeitgeist of 1930s Chicago, the Windy City's emerging black literati produced literary journals, novels, poetry and drama. Much of the difference between the two renaissances can be traced to the sources that fueled the writers' imaginations.

Like the Chicago literary scene of the thirties, the Harlem Renaissance was directly obligated to the experience of migration. Almost every important member of its literary circle arrived in Harlem from someplace else. But, surprisingly, it had paid little attention to either migration's effects or liabilities. In most respects, it was an artistic extension of the “talented tenth,” a movement overseen by college-educated mentors like DuBois and Alain Locke and animated by the bohemian sensibilities of its middle-class artistic community. In his introduction to what stands as the period's primary manifesto, “The New Negro,” Locke observed that “the young Negro writers dig deep into the racy peasant undersoil of the race life” (51).

However, despite the lyrical appeal of his earthen metaphor, Locke's romantic elevation of the commonfolk was not an altogether accurate characterization of either his anthology or Harlem literature.³ Devoted to personal discovery, Harlem's self-conscious black aesthetic championed black accomplishment, pride and advancement in a distinctly urban setting. Where its writers came from seemed only a minor prelude to the exciting prospect of where their new urban culture was headed.

In general, the core of Harlem writers tended to ignore the recently arrived working class migrants, despite the fact that it was this very population whose heterogeneous character gave the community the unique cosmopolitan flavor necessary for a full scale Renaissance. Harlem's self-conscious black aesthetic occasionally looked down-home to the South for some of its literary sources. Langston Hughes and later Sterling Brown (whose impressive poetic debut was not until 1932 with Southern Road) both incorporated their connection to their own roots into their work. But, overall, the era was more interested in capturing artistic force from a psychology of highest achievement.⁴The New Negro joined novels like Jesse Fauset's There Is Confusion (1924), Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928), Rudolph Fisher's Walls of Jericho (1928), and Wallace Thurman's Infants of the Spring (1932) in bringing to life the hum and buzz of Harlem's spirited human personality.

Fauset, Thurman and Fisher found compelling literary material in critiquing the bohemian social habits of Harlem's new bourgeoisie. Both Fauset and Thurman—despite employing a dizzying number of characters, many of them witty replicas of their real life satirical targets—focused on a relatively narrow portion of Harlem society, with minimal critical success. Fisher added more breadth to Walls of Jericho by including one of the few fictional members of the Harlem intelligentsia, Fred Merrit, to express compassion for the migrant lower-classes. Yet the distance between Merrit's world and his less fortunate neighbors is so obviously foregrounded, especially by the latter group's strained use of vernacular speech, that Fisher's sympathies for ordinary migrant culture seem forced. The payoff for these novelists came in demonstrating that, while their middle-class characters were worthy of the author's satire, the best among them possessed essentially the same assimilatory goals and values as their white counterparts. They were exemplary models of racial uplift, deserving of praise from older members of the black intellectual community like DuBois and Benjamin Brawley.

Almost without exception, the Harlem writers who looked beyond local concerns and debates and drew artistic inspiration from their pre-Harlem origins produced the most critically praised literature of the period. This includes Jean Toomer's Cane (1923), the multi-genre writings of Hughes, and, later, Brown's poetry and Zora Neale Hurston's folklore and fiction. Regardless of where they resided, the South served, for these writers, as the historical and emotional anchor of their imaginations. Since the term “New Negro” was understood to be synonymous with the “black elite,” and since many within this elite expressed a loathing for the new urban masses with whom they came to be affiliated, Harlem's literary reputation, ironically, hinged not on finding distance between these antagonistic groups but in tapping directly into their shared past. The reputation of the Harlem Renaissance's literature ultimately rested on its migrant origins.

By the early thirties, however, the Renaissance's core of writers was, in effect, supplanted by a younger generation of artists like Wright and Davis who came of age in different places under very different circumstances. The majority of Harlem writers, having disregarded their migrant neighbors and having too vigorously embraced the commercially appealing topics of “passing,” primitivism, intra-race color prejudice, and urban cabaret life, insured for themselves a legacy of fleeting period pieces, and, unsurprisingly, offered those that followed little to emulate. This new generation of writers—propelled by the depression economy, personal deprivation and a strong sense of displacement—put migration at the center, not the periphery, of its artistic imagination. The gritty middle American industrial center, the “City of the Big Shoulders,” Chicago, not Harlem, became their home base. At the center of this group was Wright, the young migrant from Mississippi, who turned to a terrifying new vocabulary of documentary realism, sociological detail, and violent black agency to summarize the conditions of black urban America.

Wright writes about his entrance into Chicago in the continuation of his 1945 autobiography Black Boy, American Hunger (1977). Viewing his departure from Memphis in terms paralleling the heroic liberation of fugitive slaves, Wright concludes Black Boy in an upbeat tone, heading North, “full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that the personalities of others should not be violated, that men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and that if men were lucky in their living on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for their having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars.”⁵ However, the images of Chicago that open American Hunger undercut Black Boy's hopeful conclusion by echoing the impenetrable modernist city more foregrounded, for example, in the poetry of T. S. Eliot than Davis' often-cited influence, Carl Sandburg. Wright's first impression of Chicago makes it seem to him an “unreal city” that “mock[s] all [his] fantasies”; Wright's “flat black stretches” of Chicago are filled with houses “built of slabs of black coal wreathed in palls of gray smoke” (249); and finally like the famous line from “Prufrock,” Chicago will become for Wright the ground on which Bigger Thomas finds that “There will be time to murder and create” (Werner 117-20).

Wright's second part of his autobiography, American Hunger, represents his migration as a mass experience of atomization that necessitates the search for a new mode of community, culturally divested of the South (Maxwell 7-8). Wright positions Bigger's rage and frustration as an inevitable response to pre-determined social forces, which grew, as he notes in “How Bigger was Born” out of a “civilization” which “contained no spiritual sustenance, [and] no culture which could hold and claim his allegiance and faith” (Native Son xix). While this is not the place to recount the many criticisms of Wright for his willingness to negate the adaptive possibilities of southern folk life, suffice it to say that his view of Chicago in American Hunger radiates throughout Native Son—as well as provides the most extreme example of a general sentiment echoed in many other novelists viewing the migration experience.

Summarized in a bleak naturalistic vision, Wright's environment mocks any pretensions of smooth adjustment to post-migration life. By giving full measure to the fury of the new Northern migrant culture, Wright, together with the like-minded core of writers referred to as the Wright school, offered a stark contrast to the less eruptive urbanization of the black bourgeoisie as it had been detailed, for example, by Harlem writers like Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset. Bernard Bell summarizes the literature orbiting around Native Son as “informed by the belief that the character and history of man can be completely explained by biological and socioeconomic facts” (167). These facts stress the violence and pathological personalities that result from racial oppression and economic exploitation. Political in intent and demoralizing in effect, the canvas of social realism inferred from this description accurately portrays Native Son as a mode characteristic of the broad strokes of a pre-modernist nineteenth century realism but equally marked by fragmented, alienating—distinctly modernist—urban landscapes.

To suggest how Davis fits into this picture, it is worth noting that he reviewed not only Native Son but also Wright's two other major works. In April of 1938, he spoke to the South Side Forum on Uncle Tom's Children, a well-attended event that had been advertised in the Chicago Defender. Soon after, he wrote a very favorable review of the short story collection. Comparing Wright to Hemingway as a “master of rugged realism” he praised Wright for rejecting the prevalent stereotype of the contented southern Negro, and in so doing hinted at his sympathies with his fellow Chicago migrant. In another review two years later, Davis was equally impressed by Native Son, which he called the “greatest novel yet by an American Negro.” He drew astute parallels between Bigger Thomas and Robert Nixon, the real life Chicago murder defendant on whose trial Wright based some of the newspaper accounts and courtroom scenes found in Native Son. Coming from Davis, such praise played an immeasurably large role in promoting Wright's career. Appearing under the banner of the Associated Negro Press, Davis' reviews found their way into newspapers from Tampa to New York to California and thereby served as the primary means by which a nation of newspaper-reading African Americans learned about Wright's achievements.⁶

However, by 1946, when Davis reviewed Black Boy, his support for Wright had soured. Though he still praised Wright's importance as a black writer, his review expressed frustration with Wright's general tone of bitterness, especially his alienation from other blacks. Like one of Wright's early disciples, Ralph Ellison, Davis had, by the conclusion of the War, come to embrace personal themes, an individual style, a suspicion of partisan politics and a guarded optimism—absent in his youth—that would set him apart from Wright. Having travelled widely and written extensively as a journalist, Davis took a more cosmopolitan view of the world than he felt was available within the limited terms of Wright's social realism.

When Wright had turned to social realism early in his career in the wake of his own participation in the Great Migration, he did so as a devoted pupil of the “Chicago School” of urban sociologists, which provided for him a sophisticated model to account for the disturbing psychological and social dislocations brought on by the exodus. Indeed, Native Son is, in a sense, Wright's case study of Chicago theories. In his introduction to Black Metropolis, he describes his personal experience with Chicago sociology: “I did not know what my story was, and it was not until I stumbled upon science that I discovered some of the meanings of the environment that battered and taunted me. I encountered the work of men who were studying the Negro community, amassing facts about urban Negro life, and I found that sincere art and honest science were not far apart, that each could enrich the other” (xvii-xviii).

Represented in the work of Horace Cayton, Robert Park, E. Franklin Frazier, and Louis Wirth, whose wife, Mary, served as the Wright family case-worker, the Chicago School viewed the black adjustment to Northern cities not as a failure of individual conditioning or genetic deficiencies, but as an ill-fated, yet rational group response to a combination of environmental pressure and deficit culture.

Chicago's urban ethnographers gave credence to the lives of black slum dwellers and legitimated their frustrations by elevating the ill-effects of deficit culture to a position of dominance. But in shifting their research emphasis away from the individual psyche and toward the circumstances that produced that individual, they did so at the cost of stigmatizing the subjects of their study. While the Chicago School relied on scientific methodology and apparently neutral data to dismantle biologically-based justifications for racial hierarchies, placed an abnormally high emphasis on what the anthropologist Oscar Lewis came to call the “culture of poverty,” Kenneth Clark titled “the pathology of the ghetto,” and the infamous Moynihan report would later label the “tangle of pathology” that characterized black urban families. The often-debated problems with the perspectives underscored in these gloomy labels can be traced to several points. They failed to account for individual modulations within the collective black experience; they underestimated the white effect on deterring black progress; and they made an obsession with casting blacks, like Bigger Thomas, in the dehumanizing role of victim.⁷

In James Baldwin's often repeated criticism of Bigger, the character thus exists as a one-dimensional social entity, devoid of a range of human emotions: “All of Bigger's life is controlled, defined by his hatred and his fear. And later, his fear drives him to murder and his hatred to rape; he dies, having come, through this violence, we are told, for the first time, to a kind of life, having for the first time redeemed his manhood” (33).⁸

The central figure of the Chicago School was Park, whose cyclical view of race-relations dominated the sociology of race for more than a quarter of a century. As a summary of the cycle suggests, Park's theory has much significance for how African American writers interpreted both the new black urban milieu and its pre-migration roots in the folk culture of the black south:

The race-relations cycle proceeds in four stages—contact, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation—in the course of which there unfolds a great cultural and social drama. Each act of this drama is dictated by laws of history and culture, Park writes, and the sequence cannot be halted or diverted. The first stage, contact, occurs when two races meet on a ‘racial frontier’ and are obliged to interact. Conflict arises when the races compete for valuable resources. The conflict is resolved by accommodation, in which a stable but asymmetrical and unequal social order is established. Finally, accommodation gives way to assimilation, when the two races merge culturally and, ultimately, physically. In the end, society becomes homogeneous.

(Lyman 27-28)

Migration plays a fundamental role in this evolutionary progression toward a Utopian city-state. Leaving their peasant societies behind, it is the “multiplicity of subcultures” that arrive in the city and break down the existing “old sacred cultures” before replacing them. The inevitable casualties along the way who fail to make the adjustment—like, for example, Bigger Thomas—are merely, in this view, an unfortunate by-product of the overall cost of progress. As the engine of social change, the city in its best sense serves as a liberating catalyst, disengaging its inhabitants from the limitations of their past communal traditions—gemeinschaft—and releasing their individual energies in the secularized, less constricting setting—geschellschaft.

Although more recent sociologists have noted the numerous problems with Park's theory, it is, nonetheless, important to recognize the undeniably large influence the intellectual model underlying the Parkian cycle had on Wright and other Chicago writers. For Wright, the Chicago School's obvious appeal could be found in the explanation it provided concerning his painful adjustment to urban life. The combination of personal history and thousands of case studies were to be woven together into a tapestry of human despair in which he and his generation could locate the documentary sources of their artistic imaginations.

It would be easy to assess Frank Marshall Davis' “hard hitting [poetry] of social criticism,” as one critic described it (Davis 120), and place him within the programmatic protest conventions of the Wright generation. However, there is a raw, optimistic energy to his Chicago verse that demands a more nuanced appraisal—and which, in turn, points to the breadth of representation within the Chicago Renaissance that challenges the negativism of the Park school of sociology. Though better educated than Wright, Davis was a journalist, not a sociologist; his first stint at Kansas State College ended after two and a half years before he left for Chicago. But nowhere in his writing does he express overt interest in the theories advanced by Park and his colleagues. For Davis, Chicago, at least in part, embodied the promise reflected in the mythology of its label as a Northern “promised land.” He figures his first sight of the city, not in terms of Wright's modernist topography, but like the orchestrated scenic montages of Sandburg, “whom,” Davis wrote, “I considered the nation's greatest poet” (Livin' 130): “Monotonous miles of freight cars and passenger coaches on a web of twisting endless tracks below, and above snakes of smoke slithering from factory chimneys and blending with the gray winter day. This was the Chicago I saw as my train rumbled toward Dearborn Street Station” (Livin' 103).

Unlike Wright, whose tales of near starvation and early poverty in Chicago are well-known, Davis was nicely suited to the town that he praised as “A broad-shouldered brute of a burgh, dirty and rough.” Even though he had never been to New York, he labeled it “a slick sissy,” compared with the “raw, savage strength of Chicago” (130). What made the Southside community, “Chicago's Congo,” so interesting to him was its people, a vibrant crowd of hustlers, hookers, gangsters, prize fighters, jazz musicians, entrepreneurs and fellow writers—a conglomeration of urban types that he classified as “stragglers, strugglers, and schemers” (112). Such types find their way into his poetry as the pathos-filled humorous portraits that give his protest verse its unique flavor. He brags in “Five Portraits of Chicago at Night” that “My city is a strongback giant of a farm boy. … / My city stands with head thrown back … shouting / … swearing … my city dares the weak sissy / cities to come out in the yard and fight … my / city is thick-muscled and big-boned.” But behind this facade of Sandburgh-inspired bravado lies smaller scenes of desperation and resiliency that call forth comparison's to Wright's own urban tableau. In “Washington Park, Chicago” from I Am the American Negro, Davis employs a deceptively upbeat rhythm of three to five syllable free verse lines to characterize a colorful variety of park denizens loosely related by their sharing of the same “humble waving grass.” “[R]agged Sam” sleeps covered only by old newspaper; a “lanky Communist” shares his message with a “glib” fisherman; the Reverend Moses Wagner cruises for “chippies,” while Montell Duke, Poet and Ph.D., strides the “winding paths.”

Davis' sharp, striking images express much affection for Chicago. His severest critics have noted that he is capable of overstating his case. Yet in viewing the every day excitement of the urban scene through the eyes of a small town Kansas boy, Davis depicts Chicago as the realization of the migrant's dream. This dream has its down side, as more negative lines about Chicago suggest—emphasized, for example in “Five Portraits, with its “gray veins on the thick body of a drowsy / giant.” Overall, Davis' vivid characterization of urban life brings to the 1930s Chicago literary scene a kind of writing that, like Wright's, is driven by the demand for social change, but, unlike Wright's, is able to temper his protest by wit, irony and a journalist's enthusiasm for detailing the scene before him.

Notes

1. Material from this essay is drawn in part from the author's forthcoming book on African American novels and the Great Migration, to be published by the University of Illinois Press.

2. Also, see Arthur P. Davis, From the Dark Tower, 120.

3. Finding that Locke's The New Negro “constitutes a high point for energies set in motion at the turn of the century,” Houston Baker recognizes the anthology's urban sensibility. It is, he writes, “a kind of manual of maroonage, a voice of a Northern, urban black population that has radically absented itself from the erstwhile plantations and devastated country districts of the South” (Modernism 122).

4. It should be noted that whatever their aspirations, in reality, few of the young Renaissance writers were as distant from their migrant neighbors as they may have liked. If they spent their night rubbing elbow with Harlem celebrities and rich whites, their days were marked by more practical pursuits. No matter their education or background, they faced the same economic challenges as everyone else in Harlem, forcing them to accept patronage and to work at a range of menial and low paying jobs to make ends meet. Langston Hughes waited tables and Countee Cullen worked as a busboy. Wallace Thurman was a managing editor of The Messenger, the sole black reader with the Macaulay publishing house, and head of the board that organized the short-lived literary magazine, Fire!!. Despite holding the most enviable and prestigious literary position among Harlem writers, Thurman still had to support himself by writing adult movie scripts and by selling “true confessions” tabloids under pseudonyms like Ethel Belle Mandrake and Patrick Casey (Hughes, Big Sea 233-34). Even the heralded “rent” parties of the period, which helped fuel Harlem's reputation as uptown New York's exotic party capital, were, more tellingly, pointed expressions of the tenuous economic circumstances in which all but a very few Harlemites were forced to live.

5. This quotation is taken from the Richard Wright's 1945 version of Black Boy (New York: Harper) 228. All other references to Black Boy (American Hunger) are from Later Works: Black Boy (American Hunger) The Outsider (1991).

6. Davis' reviews were reprinted in a number of newspapers across the country, including a review of Uncle Tom's Children in the Kansas City Call (1 April, 1938) 20; a review of Native Son in The Kansas City Call (8 March,1939) 22i and a review of Black Boy in the Chicago Sunday Bee (4 March, 1945) sec. two, p. 15. For a full citation of all the reviews, see Kinnamon, A Richard Wright Bibliography.

7. For accounts of the debate that was prefigured by E. Franklin Frazier's 1934 study of Negro family structure, see Oscar Lewis' Five Families (New York: Basic Books, 1959), Kenneth Clark's The Dark Ghetto (New York: Harper, 1965), Charles Valentine's Culture and Poverty, Critique and Counter-Proposals (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968) and, more recently, Nicholas Lemann's The Promised Land (New York: Knopf, 1991): 170-77. Lemann notes that “today the Moynihan Report stands as probably the most refuted document in American history.”

8. For a refutation of Baldwin's characterization of Wright, see Donald B.Gibson, “Wright's Invisible Native Son.”

Works Cited

Baker, Houston. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Baldwin, James. “Everybody's Protest Novel.” The Price of the Ticket. New York: St. Martin's/Marek, 1985: 27-33.

Bell, Bernard. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1987.

Bone, Robert. “Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance,” Callaloo. 28 (Summer 1986): 446-68.

Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers 1900-1960. 1974. Washington: Howard UP, 1981.

Davis, Frank Marshall. Black Man's Verse. Chicago: Black Cat P, 1935.

———. 47th Street. Prairie City, IL: Decker P, 1948.

———. Livin' the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet. Ed. and Introduction. John Edgar Tidwell. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1992.

DuBois, W. E. B. “Criteria for Negro Art.” Writings. Ed. Nathan Huggins. New York: Library of America, 1986. 993-1002.

Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Trans. Isabel Barzun. New York: Morrow, 1973.

Gibson, Donald B. “Wright's Invisible Native Son.” American Quarterly 21.4 (1969): 728-38.

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. New York: Knopf, 1940.

Kinnamon, Keneth, compiler. A Richard Wright Bibliography. New York: Greenwood P, 1988.

Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro. 1925. New York: Atheneum, 1968.

Lyman, Stanford M. The Black American in Sociological Thought. New York: Putnam 1972.

Maxwell, William. “Down-Home to Chicago: The Richard Wright-Zora Neale Hurston Debate and the Literature of the Great Migration,” Unpublished Manuscript.

Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States. Trans. Kenneth Douglas, Urbana: U of Illinois P., 1973.

Werner, Craig. “Bigger's Blues: Native Son and the Articulation of Afro-American Modernism,” New Essays on Native Son. Ed. Keneth Kinnamon. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990: 117-152.

Wright, Richard. Introduction. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. Eds. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1945.

———. Later Works: Black Boy (American Hunger) The Outsider. New York: Library of America, 1991.

———. Native Son. New York: Harper, 1940.

———. Uncle Tom's Children: Four Novellas. New York, 1938.