Between The Souls of Black Folk and Darkwater, published 4 years in the past, Dr. Du Bois has written plenty of books, none extra notable, for my part, than his novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece, during which he made Cotton the nice protagonist of fate in the lives of the Southern folks, both white and black. Let’s call it four flareguns. I will set up a Society of Russian Friends of American Freedom,” I informed them. “The American Friends of Russia have completed much to assist liberate that country. She was working to rally the help of the ladies of every nation for the world revolution, she knowledgeable me. And in fiction Paul Kester’s His Own Country is, from a purely literary standpoint, its outstanding efficiency. That’s true, to some extent. Indeed, the Negro novel is considered one of the nice potentialities of American literature. Great stuff,” he grinned, closing one eye. “Bet your life, George,” Benny admitted; “can you get us a bucket of ice? Under a literalist reading, the Bible will be learn as condemning homosexuality (and, by extension, gay marriage). But even right here the artist was concerned with the primitive instincts of the Race, and, though faithful and sincere in his portrayal, the observe was still low in the dimensions of racial life.
With Dunbar we’ve got our first authentic lyric utterance, an utterance extra genuine, I ought to say, for its faithful rendition of Negro life and character than for any rare or refined artistry of expression. Too significantly for mere coincidence, it was the stirring 12 months of 1917 that heard the primary actual masterful accent in Negro poetry. By a notable coincidence, Stewart was rich. Within the drama, till very just lately, virtually nothing value whereas has been achieved, with the exception of Angelina Grimke’s Rachel, notable for its sombre craftsmanship. Sheldon’s The Nigger, was the one notable early effort. The previous was, I believe, probably the most bold literary effort of Dunbar; the latter was his most significant; vital because, thrown against the background of new York City, it displayed the life of the race as a unit, swayed by currents of existence, of which it was and was not a component. In succession, followed Mary White Ovington’s The Shadow, through which Miss Ovington daringly created the kinship of brother and sister between a black boy and white woman, had it brought to disaster by prejudice, out of which the white girl rose to a sacrifice no white girl in a novel had hitherto accepted and endured; then Shands’ White and Black, as trustworthy a chunk of fiction with the Negro as a topic as was ever produced by a Southern pen-and on this story, additionally, the hero, Robinson, making an equally glorious sacrifice for reality and justice as Miss Ovington’s heroine; Clement Wood’s Nigger, with defects of treatment, but admirable in objective, wasted although, I believe, in the trouble to prove its thesis on wholly illogical material; and lastly, T. S. Stribling’s Birthright, more important than any of those other books, in truth, the most significant novel on the Negro written by a white American, and this regardless of its totally false conception of the character of Peter Siner.
Following The Leopard’s Spots, it was solely occasionally throughout the subsequent twenty years that the Negro was sincerely treated in fiction by white authors. Reconstruction fiction was passing out in a flood of propagandist melodrama and ridicule. But Dunbar in his fiction dealt solely successfully with the same world that gave him the inspiration for his dialect poems; though his ambition was to “write a novel that will deal with the educated class of my very own individuals.” Later he writes of The Fanatics: “You do not know the way my hopes were planted in that e-book, however it has utterly disenchanted me.” His contemporary, Charles W. Chestnutt, was involved extra primarily with the fiction of the Color Line and the contacts and conflicts of its two worlds. On most European night trains berth numbers aren’t consecutive for reservations in 2, 3, or four berth sleepers; for instance , 12 and 16 are an higher and lower berth in the identical 2-mattress sleeper.
But the preoccupation, virtually obsession of in any other case robust and artistic work like O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, and Culbertson’s Goat Alley with this similar theme and uncertain formulation of hereditary cultural reversion suggests that, in spite of all good intentions, the true presental of the actual tragedy of Negro life is a process still left for Negro writers to perform. Indeed, we could well believe that the efforts of controversy, of the massive quantity of discursive and polemical articles dealing mainly with the race problem, which have been necessary in breaking and clearing the impeded pathway of racial progress, have absorbed and in a way dissipated the literary power of many in a position Negro writers. However indifferent and unfavourable it may seem, there is the latent want in most readers to have honesty of purpose and a full imaginative and prescient in the artist: and especially in fiction, a situation dealt with with gloves can never be successfully handled. Here a new literary generation begins; poetry that is racial in substance, however with the universal note, with the aware background of the full heritage of English poetry. When the mood of Spring in New Hampshire or the sonnet The Harlem Dancer possesses him, he is stuffed with that spirit and energy of beauty that flowers above any and all males’s harming.