African American Literature in Transition, 1940–1950: Volume 11

Identifies perforation, aesthetic plurality, multi-generic virtuosity, and writerly professionalism as signposts for understanding Black literary productivity during 1940–1950.

African American literature of the 1940s boasts multi-generic virtuosity, aesthetic plurality, and several emerging artistic celebrities. An accurate account of this decade clarifies the professionalization of the Black writer and their literary tradition's role in American socio-cultural progress.1940s African American literature sits between two of the best-known periods in Black writing. Adding more intricacy to its framing, this decade's literary output commences and ends with watershed creative accomplishments by canonical mainstays in the waiting like Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. However, this book shows that mid-century Black literary productivity is not a matter of a handful of canonical figures and instead, it illuminates overt and implicit collaboration as a hallmark of the age. It identifies perforation, aesthetic plurality, multi-generic virtuosity, and writerly professionalism as signposts for understanding mid-twentieth century Black literary productivity. It engages prior assessments that cast African American literature in the 1940s based on stylistic clashes and technical stasis. It restores Black writing's role as feature of American social progress in the space between the Great Depression and the mature Civil Rights Movement.