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Preface
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
I preface I When Robert Adamson Bone died in November 2007, he left behind, besides a grieving family, a substantial but unfinished manuscript. Begun in the mid-1980s, this work was intended as the capstone of Bone’s career, the book that would fully develop the core assertions of his seminal essay “Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance,” published in 1986.1 Focusing on such figures as Wright, Arna Bontemps, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and Horace Cayton Jr., Bone argued that Chicago’s South Side experienced a period of creative ferment during the 1930s and 1940s comparable in achievement and scope to the Harlem Renaissance, that it became for some fifteen years the center of African American writing, and that Richard Wright was “the towering figure” of his generation of black literary artists. Bone’s thesis was initially articulated in the closing pages of his 1975 work, Down Home: Origins of the Afro-American Short Story. That book concludes by musing on “a little-noticed but important essay” by writer Arna Bontemps, who lived in New York from 1924 to 1931 and Chicago from 1935 to 1943. Bontemps described “a second literary awakening” centered on the South Side among black writers employed by the Chicago office of the Federal Writers’ Project. “If Bontemps is correct,” Bone wrote, “literary historians should be thinking in terms of a Chicago Renaissance. . . . The torch was passing not only from Harlem to Chicago, but from one generation to the next.”2 This idea took some time to gain traction, in part because it was first tentatively advanced in the midst of a series of important works that sparked a powerful upsurge in scholarly and popular explorations of the Harlem Renaissance.3 Such serious and sustained attention to African American creative expression has proven to be a truly significant and positive phenomenon, yet an overly concentrated focus on a single cultural moment and a single place threatens to obscure the rest of the landscape. Like the storied Mount Kilimanjaro rising loftily from the Tanzanian plains, the mountain of books on Harlem in the 1920s and early 1930s seems to overshadow everything else within sight. Coming nine years after that initial foray, Bone’s essay was well received and widely noted. Since its publication, scholars such as Carla Cappetti, Bill V. Mullen, Maren Stange, Anne Meis Knupfer, Adam Green, and Davarian Baldwin have—from various perspectives —begun filling in the topographical details of this extensive area on the cultural map that was previously terra incognita.4 Bone worked steadily on this book, initially titled Lost Renaissance, until illness slowed and then altogether stopped his progress. As his friend and former student, I began collaborating with him early in 2006 to bring the project to fruition. In proceeding from essay to book, Bone had ambitiously expanded the scope of the study: moving synchronically out from literature across the disciplines of history, music, visual arts, and sociology while diachronically tracing a line of philosophical influence and institution-building from 1930s–1940s Chicago as far back as Booker T. Washington and xv I Tuskegee Institute in the 1890s. The expansive reaches of the partially completed manuscript presented challenges at every turn, especially for a scholar working at a community college and teaching African American literature only at the introductory level. While Bone’s health still permitted active engagement, we discussed various issues related to focus, methodology, and periodization and considered how to balance and integrate the book’s three distinct threads: historical/contextual, biographical, and critical. One question we considered at some length was how best to address the influence of radical politics on black artists in Chicago. The importance of the question is posed indirectly by Randi Storch’s study of the early history of the Communist Party in Chicago and directly by Bill Mullen’s charge that “Bone systematically evades the possibility of radical political influence on Chicago.”5 What Mullen portrays as evasion might more fairly be characterized as an emphasis, within the brief span of an essay, on a different set of influences that Bone saw as both more central and less known, especially the sociological tradition associated with Robert Park and the University of Chicago. Along this line, Carla Cappetti has perceptively explored the manner in which sociology and realistic/naturalistic literature produced “two schools of urban writing” and “two groups of texts written [in Chicago] between 1915 and 1945” that were historically important and reciprocally influential.6...