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Drawing on a wide range of major literary voices, including Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, as well as lesser-known writers such as William Attaway (Blood on the Forge) and Dorothy West (The Living Is Easy), Rodgers conducts a kind of literary archaeology of the Great Migration. He mines the writers' biographical connections to migration and teases apart the ways in which individual novels relate to one another, to the historical situation of black America, and to African-American literature as a whole. In reading migration novels in relation to African-American literary texts such as slave narratives, folk tales, and urban fiction, Rodgers affirms the southern folk roots of African-American culture and argues for a need to stem the erosion of southern memory.
Sanora Babb’s long-hidden novel Whose Names Are Unknown tells an intimate story of the High Plains farmers who fled drought dust storms during the Great Depression. Written with empathy for the farmers’ plight, this powerful narrative is based upon the author’s firsthand experience. This clear-eyed and unsentimental story centers on the fictional Dunne family as they struggle to survive and endure while never losing faith in themselves. In the Oklahoma Panhandle, Milt, Julia, their two little girls, and Milt’s father, Konkie, share a life of cramped circumstances in a one-room dugout with never enough to eat. Yet buried in the drudgery of their everyday life are aspirations, failed d...
A familiar midwestern novel in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis, The Turmoil was the best-selling novel of 1915. It is set in a small, quiet city--never named but closely resembling the author's hometown of Indianapolis--that is quickly being transformed into a bustling, money-making nest of competitors more or less overrun by "the worshippers of Bigness." "There is a midland city in the heart of fair, open country, a dirty and wonderful city nesting dingily in the fog of its own smoke," begins The Turmoil, the first volume of Pulitzer Prize-winner Booth Tarkington's "Growth" trilogy. A narrative of loss and change, a love story, and a warning about the potential evils o...
In The Stricklands, Edwin Lanham tells the story of two brothers, tenant farmers who faced losing their land in 1930s Oklahoma. One brother turns to stealing; the other struggles to unite whites and blacks against the exploitative landowners. Originally published in 1939, this novel provides insight into rural life in Depression-era Oklahoma. A new foreword by Lawrence Rodgers sets Lanham’s novel in its historical, regional, and literary context.
Noting that Israel's earliest responses to earth-shaking changes were cast in the powerfully expressive language of poetry, Hugh R. Page Jr. argues that the careful collection and preservation of these traditions was an act of resistance, a communal no to the forces of despair and a yes to the creative power of the Spirit. Further, Page argues, the power of these poems to craft and shape a future for a people who had suffered acute displacement and marginalization offers a rich spiritual repertoire for Africana peoples today, and for all who find themselves perennially outside the social or political mainstream.
The Muse in Bronzeville, a dynamic reappraisal of a neglected period in African American cultural history, is the first comprehensive critical study of the creative awakening that occurred on Chicago's South Side from the early 1930s to the cold war. Coming of age during the hard Depression years and in the wake of the Great Migration, this generation of Black creative artists produced works of literature, music, and visual art fully comparable in distinction and scope to the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance. This highly informative and accessible work, enhanced with reproductions of paintings of the same period, examines Black Chicago's "Renaissance" through richly anecdotal profiles of such figures as Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Charles White, Gordon Parks, Horace Cayton, Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, and Katherine Dunham. Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage make a powerful case for moving Chicago's Bronzeville, long overshadowed by New York's Harlem, from a peripheral to a central position within African American and American studies.
Twentieth-century America has witnessed the most widespread and sustained movement of African-Americans from the South to urban centers in the North. Who Set You Flowin'? examines the impact of this dislocation and urbanization, identifying the resulting Migration Narratives as a major genre in African-American cultural production. Griffin takes an interdisciplinary approach with readings of several literary texts, migrant correspondence, painting, photography, rap music, blues, and rhythm and blues. From these various sources Griffin isolates the tropes of Ancestor, Stranger, and Safe Space, which, though common to all Migration Narratives, vary in their portrayal. She argues that the emerg...
Fanny Brandeis grows up Jewish in Winnebago, Wisconsin in the early twentieth century.
Sanora Babb’s long-hidden novel Whose Names Are Unknown tells of the High Plains farmers who fled drought and dust storms during the Great Depression. Written with empathy for the farmers’ plight, this powerful narrative is based upon the author’s firsthand experience. Babb submitted the manuscript for this book to Random House for consideration in 1939. Editor Bennett Cerf planned to publish this “exceptionally fine” novel but when John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath swept the nation, Cerf explained that the market could not support two books on the subject.
Provides a new way of looking at literary responses to migration and modernization