Category: Literature - Other
_Early Fiction._ When Americans started to write novels, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Negro was definitely part and parcel of American life. Colonial authors from Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewall to Benjamin Franklin, Crèvecour and John Woolman had protested his en...
_Early Fiction._ When Americans started to write novels, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Negro was definitely part and parcel of American life. Colonial authors from C...
2. CHAPTER II_The Plantation Tradition._ The growth and accuracy of the plantation tradition have been excellently studied in _The Southern Plantation_ (1925) by Francis Pendleton Gaines. Ga...
3. CHAPTER III_Growth of the Attitude._ The opposition to slavery, which began almost as soon as the first slaves were brought here, found literary expression in colonial times and especially...
4. CHAPTER IV_The Triumph of The Tradition._ If _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ triumphed in the antebellum “battle of the books,” being widely remembered while its opponents are forgotten, the plantati...
5. CHAPTER V_Cable._ Although he had served as an officer in the Confederate Cavalry, George Washington Cable was aware of much that was wrong in the old South and the new. His _The Silent...
6. CHAPTER VI_Beautiful, Amusing Servitude._ In the early twentieth century, under the influence of Thomas Nelson Page, a legion of writers wept over the vanished glory of the old plantation...
7. CHAPTER VII_Negro Apologists._--Aroused by the libels of Thomas Nelson Page and his school, Negro novelists stepped forward with race defense and glorification. Explaining weaknesses as th...
8. CHAPTER VIII_Sociological Realism._--T. S. Stribling’s _Birthright_ (1922) brought something new in the treatment of Negro life. The novel looks back in its problem and its preaching, and h...
9. CHAPTER IX_The Harlem School._--Before 1925 there was little in American fiction about Negro life in northern cities. But when “the peasant moved cityward” in the great sweeps of migratio...
10. CHAPTER X_Mystics and Poets._ In his _Notebook_ (1926) Sherwood Anderson tells of a Mississippian who showed the ear of a lynched Negro as a symbol of “white superiority.” Anderson seldo...
11. CHAPTER XI_The Pattern of Violence._ Although we have seen that such authors as Wood, Heyward, Adams and Frank revealed southern injustice to the Negro, it has remained for a later group...
12. CHAPTER XIIThe present vogue of historical fiction has given new impetus to the long-standing interest in the Old South and the Negro. The African slave-trade, the antebellum and the recon...