African American literature

The advent of urban realism > The 1940s

During the 1930s and '40s Hughes and Sterling A. Brown kept the folk spirit alive in African American poetry. An admirer of Hughes, Margaret Walker dedicated For My People (1942), the title poem of which remains one of the most popular texts for recitation and performance in African American literature, to the same black American rank and file whom Hughes and Brown celebrated. By the early 1940s three figures, Melvin B. Tolson, Robert Hayden, and Chicagoan Gwendolyn Brooks, were showing how the vernacular tradition could be adapted to modernist experimentation. The variety of expressiveness and formal innovation in African American poetry of the 1940s is reflected in Tolson's densely allusive Rendezvous with America (1942), Hayden's meditative history poems such as Middle Passage (1945) and Frederick Douglass (1947), and Brooks's tribute to the vitality and rigours of black urban life in A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and her Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, Annie Allen (1949). The 1940s was also a decade of creative experimentation in autobiography, led by Du Bois's Dusk of Dawn (1940), a self-styled “essay toward an autobiography of a race concept”; Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), an early venture in “autoethnography,” the writing of self via the characterization of a culture (in this case, the rural Southern black culture of Hurston's roots); J. Saunders Redding's No Day of Triumph (1942), the story of an alienated Northern professional's quest for redemptive immersion in Southern black working-class communities; and Wright's Black Boy.

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  The advent of urban realism
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    Chicago writers
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    The 1940s
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  Additional Reading