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Books by and
about John Oliver Killens
Youngblood /
And Then We Heard the Thunder
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The Cotillion /
The Great Black Russian
A Man-Aint-Nothin But A Man Adventures of John Henry /
Slaves /
Sippi A Novel /
Black-SouthernVoices: An Anthology
Great-Gittin-Up-Morning: A
Biography of Denmark Vesey
Keith Gilyard,
Liberation Memories: The Rhetoric and Poetics of John Oliver
Killens (2003)
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John Oliver Killens (1916-1987)
Novelist, Harlem Guild Writer
Published originally on the heels of the
Supreme Court's decision of 1954,
Youngblood marked the
beginning of a new era in African American literature, for it
broke starkly with the Wright school and opened a path for those
novelists, poets, and playwrights who comprised the Neo-Black
Arts Movement--a movement that recognized John Oliver Killens as
its spiritual father."
--Toni
Cade Bambara
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John Oliver Killens's landmark novel of social protest
of a Georgia family from the turn of the
century to the Great Depression chronicles the lives of the Youngblood family and their friends
in Crossroads, Georgia, from the turn of the century to the
Great Depression. Its large cast of powerfully affecting
characters includes Joe Youngblood, a tragic figure of heroic
physical strength; Laurie Lee, his beautiful and strong-willed
wife; Richard Myles, a young high school teacher from New York;
and Robby, the Youngbloods' son, who takes the large risk of
becoming involved in the labor movement.
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John Oliver Killens (January 14,1916–October
27, 1987),
born in Macon, Georgia, to Charles Myles, Sr., and
Willie Lee (Coleman) Killens. John Killens credits his
relatives with fostering in him cultural pride and
literary values. His father Charles encouraged him to
read a weekly column by Langston Hughes; his mother
Willie Lee, president of the Dunbar Literary Club,
introduced him to poetry; and his great-grandmother
filled his boyhood with the hardships and tales of
slavery.
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| These early exposures to criticism, art,
and folklore are evident in Killens' fiction, which
depicts accurately social classes, engaging narratives,
and successful layering of African-American history,
legends, songs, and jokes.
Killens planned to be a lawyer. He attended Edward
Waters College in Jacksonville, Florida (1934-1935) and
Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia (1935-1936). He
moved to Washington, D.C. and became a staff member of
the National labor Relations Board (NLRB) and completed
his B.A. through evening classes at Howard University.
He studied at the Robert Terrel Law School from 1939
until 1942, but he completed only two-thirds of the
program before he joined the army. |
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His second novel
And Then We Heard the Thunder (1963), which concerned racism in the military and
the growth of racial identity and consciousness, was based on
his service in the South Pacific. This novel, which deals
also with a race riot, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In
1946, Killens returned briefly to his job at the NLRB. In
1947-1948, he organized black and white workers for the Congress
of industrial Organization (CIO) and was an active member of the
Progressive Party. He soon became convinced that leading
intellectuals, the white working class, and the U.S. government
were not committed to an inclusive society. In
1948, Killens moved to New York and attended writing classes at
Columbia University and New York University. He met such
influential figures as Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and W.E.B.
Du Bois. While working on his fiction, he wrote regular articles
for the leftist newspaper Freedom (1951-1955). During this
period Killens developed definitive views on the purpose of the
novel. He thus attacked Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as a
"decadent mixture . . . a vicious distortion of Negro
life." Killens believed that literature should be created
to improve society. "Art is functional. A Black work of art
helps the liberation or hinders it." Killens
found other young writers with a similar perspective. With Rosa
Guy, John Henrik Clarke, and Walter Christmas, Killens founded
the Harlem Writers Guild in the early 1950s. Youngblood (1954)
was the fist novel published by a guild member. The novels
treats the struggles of a southern black family in early
twentieth-century Georgia. With critical praise of the work,
Killens toured to speak on subjects concerning African
Americans. Some of the better known members and alumnae of
the Guild include Maya Angelou, Ossie Davis, Audrey Lorde,
Terry McMillan, Lon Elder III, Paule Marshal and Walter Dean
Myers. In 1955, Killens went to Alabama
to research for a screenplay on the Montgomery bus Boycott and
to visit with the reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He also
became close friends close friends with Malcolm X and with him
in 1964 founded the organization for Afro-American Unity (OAAU).
Black Man's Burden (1965), a collection of political essays,
documents his combination of socialist and nationalist
sentiments.
| Below: John Oliver
Killens with poet and critic Sterling Brown |
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Killens' major subject is
the violence and racism of American society, how it hinders
manhood and family. 'Sippi (1967) is about a struggle
over voting rights.
The Cotillion; or One Good Bull Is Half
the Herd, published in 1971 and nominated for the Pulitzer
Prize, satirizes middle-class African-American values, and was
the basis for Cotillion, a play produced 1975 in New York
City. Killens' other plays include Ballad of the Winter
Soldiers (1964), with Loften Mitchell) and Lower Than the
Angels (1965). he wrote two screenplays, Odds Against
Tomorrow (1959, with Nelson Gidding) and Slaves (1969, with
Herbert J. Biberman and Alida Sherman). He also edited The Trial
Record of Denmark Vesey (1972) and A man Ain't Nothing but a
man: The Adventures of John Henry (1975). |
By
the mid-1960s, Killens had already started a string of positions
as a writer-in-residence: at Fisk University (1965-1968),
Columbia University (1970-1973), Howard University (1971-1972),
Bronx Community College (1979-1981), and Medgar Evers College in
the City University of New York (1981-1987). Other awards
included a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts
(1980) and a lifetime Achievement Award from the before Columbus
Foundation (1986). Until his death, Killens continued continued
to contribute articles to leading magazines such as Ebony,
Black World, The Black Aesthetic, and African
Forum.
The Great Black Russian: a Novel on the Life and
Times of Alexander Pushkin was published posthumously in
1988 Source: Encyclopedia of
African-American Culture and History (Vol. 3)*
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John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary
Activism
By Keith
Gilyard
“I congratulate Keith Gilyard
for bringing to life, in the pages of this absorbing
book, a figure of genuine importance who certainly
deserves a full-scale biography.”—Arnold
Rampersad, author of Ralph Ellison: A Biography
John Oliver
Killens is a genius of the South, and Keith Gilyard
has honored this youngblood, civil rights and union
activist, novelist, dramatist, and screenwriter in a
superb biography. Gilyard’s engaging written voice
draws us into a dramatic and important life, and his
deep commitment to the highest standards of research
inspires our trust and admiration. John Oliver
Killens ably documents and brings to life the
yearnings and accomplishments of a major figure in
our national literature.—Rudolph
P. Byrd, Goodrich C. White Professor of American
Studies, Emory University |
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John Henrik Clarke—A Great and Mighty Walk
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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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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updated 12 June 2008
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