Books by Sterling Brown

Southern Road / The Negro Caravan / The Collected Poems of Sterling Brown  /

The Negro in American Fiction; Negro Poetry and Drama  / Last Ride of Wild Bill and Eleven Narrative Poems

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Books about Sterling Brown

Joanne,Gabbin. Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition (1994)

John Edgar Tidwell, Sterling A. Brown's A Negro Looks at the South (2007)

Charles Rowell. Callaloo's Sterling A. Brown: Special Issue (1998)

Mark A. Sanders. Afro-Modernist Aesthetics & the Poetry of Sterling Brown (1999)

Mark A. Sanders. A Son's Return: Selected Essays of Sterling Brown (1996)

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1222 Kearny Street, NE

                                                                                         Washington, D.C.

                                                                                         April 20, 1939  

Dear Walter:

I don't know whether she has written you yet, but Mrs. Florence Murray Collins is working on the cook-book material which you spoke to me about. She has already turned up some most interesting stuff and is enthusiastic about the search.

I am back on the project at long last, i.e., back on the pay-roll. I've been beset for advisory work for a long time.

One of the crucial matters facing me upon my return is the continued jeopardy of the Arts projects. You rallied the support of the NAACP to the project before. I am writing to ask you to rally support again.

In Congress a bill is to be introduced aimed particularly at the white collar projects, localizing them in the States and getting them away from centralized control. I know that you realize what this would mean in relationship, let us say, to the the Writers' project in southern States. We already have too few, but once localized in the States, we would have no Negro writers on the Project at all. (And from what I can gather, not too many white.)

I am asking then, that you urge your secretaries to have the members of the association write to their Congressmen and Senators urging opposition to any bill aiming to curtail Arts projects or to localize them or to reorganize them.

I suppose you read of my being "red-baited" because I mentioned miscegenation in connection with the founding fathers. Well, I'm sitting tight. That's one aspect of American history of which I welcome a thorough-going investigation.

Love to family. I'll be in New York in may. the book is not prospering. They like it; they believe they can't sell it; they won't take it. I like it; believe they can sell it; but can't make them take it (even if I would). Luck to you and thanks.

                                                                    Sincerely,

                                                                    (Official title: The Flying Dutchman.)

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posted 29 June 2008