African American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940: Volume 10

This book illustrates African American writers' cultural production and political engagement despite the economic precarity of the 1930s.

The volume is for scholars and researchers interested in African American and American literature and history. Chapters explore African American writing during the Great Depression to examine 1930s Black life, culture, and politics and, ultimately, to document the ways Black artists and everyday people managed their economic vulnerability.The volume explores 1930s African American writing to examine Black life, culture, and politics to document the ways Black artists and everyday people managed the Great Depression's economic impact on the creative and the social. Essays engage iconic figures such as Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, and Richard Wright as well as understudied writers such as Arna Bontemps and Marita Bonner, Henry Lee Moon, and Roi Ottley. This book demonstrates the significance of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and Black literary circles in the absence of white patronage. By featuring novels, poetry, short fiction, and drama alongside guidebooks, photographs, and print culture, African American Literature in Transition 1930-1940 provides evidence of the literary culture created by Black writers and readers during a period of economic precarity, expanded activism for social justice, and urgent internationalism.