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Forgotten Manuscripts: Fenton Johnson’s A Wild Plaint
- African American Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 50, Number 1, Spring 2017
- pp. 1-15
- 10.1353/afa.2017.0000
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
Fenton Johnson’s A Wild Plaint offers new perspectives on Johnson’s early creative writing and “post-bellum, pre-Harlem” literature more generally. The fictional work, submitted as nonfiction to publisher Doubleday, Page & Co. in 1909, engages with The Souls of Black Folk and in its intentional subversion of genre offers a compelling precursor to The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man.