Forgotten Manuscripts: Fenton Johnson’s A Wild Plaint

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.