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God Sends Sunday: Novel /
Black Thunder, Gabriel's Revolt: Virginia, 1800 /
Anyplace But Here /
The Harlem Renaissance Remembered
The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949
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Bontemps, American Negro Poetry
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Arna
Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters, 1925-1967
The Old South;: "A summer tragedy" and other stories
of the thirties /
The Story of the Jubilee Singers /
Great Slave Narratives
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Preface to
Anyplace But Here
By Jack Conroy and Arna Bontemps
When Jack Conroy and I first began to compare
notes on Negro Migrations within the United States, our desks were
about twenty feet apart. We were both employed as editorial
supervisors on the Illinois Writers Project of the WPA. Not far
away, at a similar desk, was a serious young supervisor who never
wasted much time but whom I thought I saw making eyes at a slender
young typist in the secretarial pool. He was Nelson Algren. Across
the big room, in an area assigned to the radio unit, one
occasionally saw the energetic and personable young figures of
Studs Terkel and Lou Gilbert, both clearly marked for bigger
future roles in television and movies, respectively.
Katherine Dunham, Richard Wright, Frank Yerby,
Stuart Engstrand, and George V. Martin had worked at these same
desks just weeks or months earlier, and some of them returned
occasionally to see how things were going. Meanwhile, their
successors continued to fill the files with gleanings from old
Illinois newspapers and other library sources. After Conroy and I
got steamed up about Negro migrations, we began to pay even closer
attention. We discovered, for example, that Katherine Dunham, who
had been working for a doctoral degree in anthropology at the
University of Chicago, had directed her writers to collect
information about the groups that later became widely known as
Black Muslims. We came across an inspired days work by a writer
who had done nothing but list the names of storefront churches on
one street in the southside ghetto. And what names they were!
The project ended suddenly, but not before it
and others like it had made publishing history with the excellent
series of state guides and other books and pamphlets of regional
or local interest, often of substantial value to later
researchers. Peripheral benefits, sometimes too intangible to be
measured by linage or pagination, were often noted, and the
opportunity for development afforded the likes of Wright and Yerby
and Algren was matched by the rivitalization of old timers like
the poet Fenton Johnson who had been hit even harder by the
depression. While Johnson's WPA Poems did not get published as a
collection, they obviously did him a lot of good.
When the Project came to an end, a publisher
who had heard about our interest in the migration story encouraged
us to develop it. We went to work, and They Seek a City was
published in 1945. One thing about the impulse we had tried to
trace was apparent at first. Another became apparent later. We
soon realized that we were dealing with currents that were still
running vigorously and that we could not tell when or where they
would crest. To that extent our book was premature. But the
disasters ahead in Watts and Chicago and Harlem which were later
to focus intense light on this fantastic population shift, with
all its dislocations, could not have been foreseen. Nor could they
have been understood prior to the events of the fifties and
sixties, disclosing the depth and intensity of the Negro
American's drive toward freedom. Needless to say, twenty years of
change and unforeseen developments have made it necessary to
recast most of the original chapters of the book and to add a
number of new ones.
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Anyplace But Here
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Arna Wendell Bontemps : A Bibliography
Robert E Fleming. James
Weldon Johnson and Arna Wendell Bontemps: A
reference guide. G. K. Hall, 1978
Kirkland C. Jones.
Man from Louisiana; A Biography of Arna Wendell
Bontemps.. Greenwood Press, 1992.
Sterling Brown "Arna
Bontemps: Co-worker, Comrade." Black World
22:11 (September 1973): 92-98.
Wikipedia-Wendell_Bontemps
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Jack Conroy (1899-1990) wrote the influential
novel,
The Disinherited, which sold only 2,700 copies at
the time of publication. Yet Conroy was regarded as one of the
great proletarian writers of the 1930s, and is still remembered
as such because his radical politics never softened with time.
He authored or contributed to numerous books, including fiction,
children's fiction, poetry, essay, and sociology. He edited
several publications including Rebel Port, 1931-1932, Anvil,
1933-1937 and New Anvil 1939-41.
He was an associate
editor of Nelson's Encyclopedia and Universal World
Encyclopedia from 1943-1947. In 1935 he received the
Guggenheim fellowship for creative writing. Conroy also reviewed
for several major newspapers and taught creative writing at a
few colleges. |
Other Books by Jack Conroy
The Fast Sooner Hound
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Sam Patch the High and Wide Handsome Jumper /
They Seek a City
Worker-Writer in America: Jack Conroy and the
Tradition of Midwestern Literary Radicalism, 1898-1990
Jack Conroy
Reader /
A World to Win /
Unrest 1931 (radical poetry) /
The Weed King & Other Stories
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Arna
Wendell Bontemps (1902-1973) -- born in Alexandria,
Louisiana, the son of Creole parents -- was one of the more prolific writers of the
Harlem Renaissance. He was the author of over 25 books of
poetry, history, biography, fiction and anthologies. Bontemps
was a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Bontemps served as
head librarian at Fisk University from 1969 to 1972. He was also
curator of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro
Arts and Letters at Yale University.
In 1923, Bontemps
received his B.A. from Pacific Union College in Angwin. In 1924,
his poetry appeared in Crisis
magazine, the NACCP periodical edited by Dr. W.E.B. DuBois. In 1926 Golgotha
Is a Mountain won the Alexander Pushkin Award and in 1927 Nocturne
at Bethesda achieved first honors in the Crisis poetry contest.
Personals, a collection of poetry was published in 1963. |
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Bontemps then turned to
prose. In the decade of the thirties, he wrote three acclaimed novels
God Sends Sunday (1931);
Black Thunder (1936); and Drums at
Dusk (1939). Frustrated in his ability to reach his own generation
Bontemps to literature for children and young graders. In 1937 he
published the
Sad-Faced Boy; and others for young audience
included
We Have Tomorrow (1945) Slappy Hopper (1946) and
Story
of the Negro (1948).
Bontemps was involved in the publication of at least three
anthologies:
Golden Slippers: An
Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers (1941); with
Langston Hughes,
The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949
(1949);
and
Bontemps, American Negro Poetry
(1963 & 1974 rev.).
Bontemps was gracious enough to include Christian's poems in all his
anthologies.
Bontemps' beautiful short story "A Summer
Tragedy"
is found often in anthologies. It is indeed a treat. His poems "A
Black Man Thinks of Reaping," "Southern
Mansion," and
"Nocturne at Bethesda" are often anthologized. But such poems
as "My Heart Has Known Its Winter" and "Day
Breakers" are also found in anthologies.
Early in his career Bontemps had wanted to get a Ph.D. in English but
with his marriage in 1926 and the coming of six children he had to work.
He taught for awhile at an Alabama junior college. With the coming of
the Depression he worked for the Illinois WPA and supervised and
assisted in the writing of a history of the Negro in Illinois. In 1943
he completed a degree in library science and served as librarian at Fisk
University and developed an archive of African American
cultural materials that is a major resource for study in this field.* * *
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Drums at Dusk
By Arna
Bontemps
A story of
love, violence, and race set at the outbreak of
the Haitian Revolution in 1791, African American
writer Arna Bontemps's Drums at Dusk immerses
readers in the opulent and brutal--yet also very
fragile--society of France's richest colony,
Saint Domingue.
First
published in 1939, this novel explores the
complex web of tensions connecting wealthy
plantation owners, poor whites, free people of
color, and the slaves who stunned the colony and
the globe by uniting in a carefully planned
uprising.
The novel's
hero, Diron Desautels, a white Creole born in
Saint Domingue who belongs to the French
antislavery group Société des Amis des Noirs,
attempts to spread his message of "liberty,
equality, fraternity" in a world fraught with
conflict. |
Imaginatively inhabiting a wide spectrum
of Haitian voices, including those of white indentured
servants, female slaves, and Toussaint L'Ouverture, who
later emerged as the revolution's best-known hero,
Bontemps's work reflects not only the intricacies of Haitian
society on the eve of the revolution, but also a black
artist's vision of Haiti in the twentieth century, during
the U.S. Marines' occupation and at the brink of war in
Europe. A new introduction by Michael P. Bibler and Jessica
Adams reveals how Drums at Dusk--even seventy years after
its original publication--contributes to contemporary
studies of the American South as part of the larger
plantation region of the Caribbean, and inspires a
reevaluation of assumptions about revolution, race, and
nationalism.
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update 1 May 2009
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