Literary Ambition and the African American Novel

A new account of how African American literature emerged from the competitive ambition of landmark novelists, from Chesnutt to Ellison.

This book is for readers interested in how the modern African American novel entered and changed the mainstream of American literature. It tells the story of the ambitious, competitive authors who wrote the landmark African American novels while also struggling against the positions they had won as 'Negro authors'.This book shows how African American literature emerged as a world-recognized literature: less as the product of a seamless tradition of writers signifying upon their ancestors and more the product of three generations of ambitious, competitive individuals aiming to be the first great African American writer. It charts a canon of fictional landmarks, beginning with The House Behind the Cedars and culminating in the National Book Award-Winner Invisible Man, and tells the compelling stories of the careers of key African American writers, including Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. These writers worked within the white-dominated, commercial, Eurocentric literary field to put African American literature on the world literary map, while struggling to transcend the cultural expectations attached to their position as 'Negro authors'. Literary Ambition and the African American Novel tells as much about the novels that these writers could not publish as it does about their major achievements.