The Negro in American fiction

by STERLING BROWN
KENNIKAT PRESS, INC./PORT WASHINGTON, N. Y.
EDITORIAL FOREWORD
This Bronze Booklet aims at a survey of the Negro in American fiction, both as character and author. It is the first full-length presentation of this subject, but differs from the usual academic survey by giving a penetrating analysis of the social factors and attitudes behind the various schools and periods considered. Sterling A. Brown, now associate professor of English at Howard University, born and educated in Washington, D. C., was graduated from Williams College in 1922 with Phi Beta Kappa honors and the Clark Fellowship to Harvard, received his master’s degree at Harvard in 1923, and has since pursued graduate work in English literature at Harvard University. He has had wide experience teaching at Virginia Seminary and College, Lynchburg, Va., 1923-26, at Lincoln University, Mo., 1926-28, Fisk University, 1928-29, and at Howard University from 1929 to date. His volume of verse, Southern Road , published in 1932, put him in the advance-guard of younger Negro poets, and, as well, the then new school of American regionalist literature. In 1937, Professor Brown was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing and among other things, will complete for publication his second volume of verse, “ No Hiding Place .” Since 1936, he has been directing editor on Negro materials of the Federal Writers’ Project at Washington headquarters. For the last five years, his literary book review comments in Opportunity under the caption: “ The Literary Scene ,” have revealed a critical talent of sane but progressive and unacademic tendencies,—a point of view that the reader will find characteristically carried through in this provocative and masterly study.
Alain Locke
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The treatment of the Negro in American fiction, since it parallels his treatment in American life, has naturally been noted for injustice. Like other oppressed and exploited minorities, the Negro has been interpreted in a way to justify his exploiters.