The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 by Lawrence P. Jackson (review)

Dauntingly ambitious and brilliantly executed, Lawrence Jackson's The Indignant Generation deftly charts the ideological twists and narrative turns of African American literature and criticism from the hopeful days of New Deal economics to the tense days of pre-Black Power racial nationalism. In a surprising but effective move, Jackson uses the tortuous career of the now somewhat obscure scholar-novelist J. Saunders Redding to define the dilemmas facing black writers during this relatively neglected period. Considered one of the deans of African American scholarship from the 1950s through the 1970s, Redding was the author of To Make a Poet Black (1939), a sweeping study of African American literature from the eighteenth century to the 1930s. Yet he also made a name as a serious novelist, whose Stranger and Alone (1950) anticipated Ellison's soon-to-be-published Invisible Man (1952). What interests Jackson most in Redding are the conflicts he encountered as he navigated his way through his age's political, aesthetic and social minefields. As both a critic and imaginative writer, Redding found himself caught between racially charged protest literature and politically disengaged modernist aesthetics, between racist American democracy and race-uplift communist movements, and between black assimilationists and black nationalists. The Indignant Generation pivots on these dilemmas, which, according to Jackson, injured Redding's writing life and significantly damaged his later reputation. What is more important, however, is that Jackson uses these dilemmas to illuminate the lives and works of numerous writers from the mid-twentieth century.

Jackson's ability to provide a multilayered context in which great works emerged is inestimably valuable. For instance, in the lead-up to his discussion of the momentous publication of Wright's Native Son in 1940, Jackson skillfully examines the influence of Sterling Brown's searing analysis of stereotypes of blacks in U. S. literature, the degree to which "communism was helping blacks to become twentieth-century Americans" (57), the repudiation of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s, the positive impact of the Julius Rosenwald Fund ("the most important grant-giving body to African American intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s" [97]), and African American intellectuals' knotty but escalating critique of white liberals. Taken alone, each of these examinations is stimulating and insightful. But when one realizes how they work together to set the stage for Jackson's chapter "Bigger Thomas among the Liberals," the cumulative effect is intellectually staggering. This is not to say that Jackson shapes all this material to offer a new interpretation of Wright's novel. Rather, his focus is on the "Native Son effect—really the Bigger Thomas effect," which "stimulated an enormous growth in consciousness in American audiences and publishers" (125). Bigger replaced "the stereotype of Uncle Tom" in the minds of blacks and whites (125). His challenging character forced writers to do more "dense psychological realist exploration" (130), and established Wright as "the point man for black defiance in the 1940s" (138). Put simply, Jackson persuasively demonstrates just why black writers felt compelled to take their aesthetic and political cues from Wright after 1940.

Native Son put white liberals, in particular, in an uncomfortable position. After Wright's searching depiction of the Dalton family (the Daltons' financially support the NAACP but get rich from slum tenements), these liberals began to take a more serious approach to the issue of race. For instance, the editor Thomas Sancton produced "a cutting edge kind of literary criticism" imagining "a world uninflected by race bias" (155). In 1943, Bucklin Moon published The Darker Brother, which established his "credentials as the most liberal white American novelist" (153). A year after its appearance, Jackson claims, "white writers no longer delved into extended caricature with the presumption that it might stand in for serious literature" (156). By the mid-forties, however, black writers began to refine techniques for picturing "the unconscious of white America," the dark realm where writers such...