PAPERBACK ISBN: 0-88258-058-2      $35.95

328 pages; 6 x 9 inches

Afro-American Writers, 1900-1960

Edited by Arthur P. Davis

From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900-1960, edited by renowned literature scholar Arthur P. Davis, is an over­view of significant black writers and their works from the turn of the 20th century to 1960. Representative selections from each of the major periods of African American literature­ from 1900 through the Harlem Renaissance and from the 1930s through the 1950s are preceded by extensive introductions that place the writers and their works in literary, historical, and political perspective. The first section of the book, aptly entitled “The Planters” (1900–1925), discusses such writers as Alain Locke, W. E. B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer, whom Davis contends provided the cultural foundation for the writers of the next period.  Those who followed these pioneering literary figures are aptly described in the second section, “First Fruits” (1925–1940), which includes discussion of and selections from Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, and Sterling Brown.  Black writers of the period 1940 to 1960, including notables such as Richard Wright, Margaret Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks, are discussed with a view toward their contributions to the evolving body of black literature and American culture as a whole.

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