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Edward Bland
- University of Illinois Press
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edWard Bland (february 2, 1908–March 20, 1945) lawrence Jackson As a phenomenon of American literary history, the Chicago Renaissance that began in the second half of the 1930s is most significant for its articulation of an almost complete break with the “Harlem” or “New Negro” Renaissance of the 1920s. The radical tenor of the artists associated with the Chicago movement developed in two distinct forms: the social realism and literary protest of the 1930s and early 1940s, and the high modernism of the second half of the 1940s. The early work of Richard Wright, the early short stories of Frank Yerby, Frank Marshall Davis’s poetry, the novels of William Attaway, and the plays of Theodore Ward represent well the efforts of protest realism; the later work of Richard Wright, beginning with “The Man Who Lived Underground” of 1944, the poetry of Robert Hayden, and the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks best characterize the second movement. These achievements culminated with the efforts of the bestknown high modernist novelist, Ralph Ellison. This momentous break from the literary strains of the 1920s and 1930s required a series of radical judgments to refine and transform the literary aesthetics of African American writers. The first black writer who developed a body of criticism that made a departure from a straightforward doctrinaire Marxist analysis, but who captured the dissident spirit of the new generation, was Edward Bland, brother to novelist Alden Bland. Black critics had been conscious of the tension to assimilate into the white American mainstream, but rarely had they looked analytically at the structure of Western literary evolutions and their place as a formerly enslaved racial minority within that structure. In 1935 and 1937, the black Marxist critics Eugene Gordon, Eugene Holmes, and Richard Wright presented a broad refutation of what they saw as a tendency towards romanticism and assimilation in African American writing. Of these, Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937) is the best known and recognized as the most definitive. And yet, the essays do not strike a completely compelling note; there is a dogmatic formulism in them that lacks complete freshness and originality. Bland’s major works, “Social Forces Shaping the Negro Novel,” and “Racial Bias in Negro Poetry,” edWard Bland • 77 introduced key literary terms that produced new revelations about the value of African American literature and culture and its relation to the American mainstream. Edward Bland was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on February 2, 1908. His father, Edward Bland III, had moved to Chicago seeking work and sent for his wife Philomene and his two sons Edward and Alden from Louisiana in 1919. Edward and his brother grew up on the South Side, and Edward attended Wendell Phillips High School. After high school Bland married Althea McCoy, and began a career at the U.S. Post Office in Chicago. Bland had four children, two of whom survived: Geraldine, and Edward O. Bland, the noted composer, director of films, and maker of the tour de force documentary “The Cry of Jazz.” During the Depression Bland lived at 5951 Indiana Avenue, where he collected thousands of books, from John Dewey and Bertrand Russell to Karl Marx. The neighborhood was culturally and intellectually alive and included institutions such as the Carter School, Englewood High School, and Wilson Junior College . Self-taught and active in politics, Bland pursued a career as a disciplined adherent to the philosophy of dialectical materialism. He believed in developing his own talents but he also engaged in local cultural associations. Bland was an original member of the South Side Writers Club, formed immediately following the National Negro Congress of February 1936. The club was created by Richard Wright and held its first meeting at the home of Robert Davis, Bland’s best friend, and then the group maintained regular weekly meetings at the Abraham Lincoln Center on Oakwood Blvd. While Davis went on to become a Hollywood actor under the name Davis Roberts, Bland turned himself into a literary critic. At the meetings, Bland developed his ideas, criticism, and fiction alongside Wright, Margaret Walker, Frank Marshall Davis, Theodore Ward, Russell Marshall, Fern Gayden, Robert Davis, and Arna Bontemps. Among such distinguished peers, Bland was considered a leader in matters of literary criticism, and he was especially close to Fern Gayden. On occasions when the group met at his home, Bland required his adolescent son to listen to Richard Wright read his short stories. After Wright departed in the late spring of 1937, according to Margaret...