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IntroduCtIon In 1904, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins wrote an article describing the technological advancements of the New York City subway system for The Voice of the Negro. Interestingly, at the end of the article, Hopkins cautioned readers not to rest on their laurels. Even though the rapid transit system was a significant accomplishment for a city equated with “the road to success,” Hopkins made a point of admonishing that “we hope that the warning words of Emerson will forever impress this country and its citizens: ‘The civility of no race is perfect whilst another race is degraded.’”1 In essence, Hopkins used this article to argue that upper- and middle-class Anglo Americans could not boast of their cultural refinement and moral superiority, as evidenced in these technological advancements, as long as racism continued to subjugate African Americans. According to historian Nell Irvin Painter, during the last decades of the nineteenth century, “Americans endowed technology with qualities they imagined to be uniquely American: prosperity, mobility, and democracy.”2 For Hopkins, true American democracy and the civility of its entire citizenry could be achieved only when people of color were no longer prevented from contributing to, and fully benefiting from, the nation ’s prosperity. Indeed, Hopkins’s concern for the progress and success of the American people, especially of African Americans, was not isolated to the subject of this single article; rather, it occupied her literary imagination throughout her career. Through journalism, drama, short stories, and novels , Hopkins endeavored to expose the racism and sexism inherent in both the gospel of success and the iconic image of the self-made man. The self-made man is a common trope in late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular American literature and culture. The working and middle classes faced significant challenges during the Gilded Age, from labor disputes to economic depressions. Both children and adults sought what Paulette Kilmer calls “a refuge from modernity” by reading archetypal tales of poor young boys working to become successful businessmen.3 It x Introduction is important to note that the gospel of success did not embody the reality of American society at the turn of the twentieth century. In actuality, few working- and middle-class people were able to follow the tenets of the gospel of success and achieve wealth, regardless of their ethnicity. Kilmer observes that, “real workers frequently rose to supervisory positions, while fewer than ten in every one hundred millionaires had grown up in lower-class families .”4 Furthermore, scholars have noted the definition of success has varied over time. For example, there is a significant difference in opinion about the importance of wealth in the success formula and the historical periods when it has been most crucial. Richard Huber claims that “In America, success has meant making money and translating it into status, or becoming famous.”5 For Huber it has also meant “attaining riches or achieving fame.”6 Yet, Richard Weiss cautions that “in current parlance, ‘wealth’ and ‘success ’ are used as synonyms; this was not so through much of the nineteenth century.”7 Rex Burns concurs that success has not always denoted wealth: “indeed, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that such a definition became a sanctioned code.”8 These varied emphases on wealth do not belie the fact that success necessitated moderate to high earnings or net worth. Still, there is a consensus that the self-made man of this period achieved some form of affluence, eminence, respectability, and social mobility, while personal virtues of the self-made man included “Thrift, perseverance, loyalty , integrity, [and] honor.”9 Very few literary critics address the role that the self-made man and success literature played in the lives of turn-of-thecentury African Americans; however, Hopkins believed such literature served the African American community in ways that did more than offer readers an escape from the real world. For Hopkins, fiction was “a record of growth and development from generation to generation” and she believed she could use popular literature—fiction and nonfiction—to encourage and track the black community’s progress.10 Ever since Pauline Hopkins’s work was rediscovered in the mid-twentieth century, literary scholars have focused their efforts on situating her within the sentimental and domestic literary traditions of nineteenth-century women’s writing. In Ann Allen Shockley’s 1972 watershed article, “Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: A Biographical Excursion Into Obscurity,” she notes that the depiction of mob violence and lynching contained in Contending Forces “is told...

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