Chapter I: Front Matter

THE NEGRO
IN AMERICAN FICTION

_by_
STERLING BROWN

KENNIKAT PRESS, INC./PORT WASHINGTON, N. Y.

KENNIKAT PRESS SERIES IN NEGRO CULTURE AND HISTORY

THE NEGRO IN AMERICAN FICTION

Copyright 1937 by Associates in Negro Folk Education
Reissued in 1968 by Kennikat Press
Library of Congress Catalog Card No: 68-25492
Manufactured in the United States of America

EDITORIAL FOREWORD

This Bronze Booklet aims at a survey of the Negro in American fiction, both as character and author. It is the first full-length presentation of this subject, but differs from the usual academic survey by giving a penetrating analysis of the social factors and attitudes behind the various schools and periods considered. Sterling A. Brown, now associate professor of English at Howard University, born and educated in Washington, D. C., was graduated from Williams College in 1922 with Phi Beta Kappa honors and the Clark Fellowship to Harvard, received his master’s degree at Harvard in 1923, and has since pursued graduate work in English literature at Harvard University. He has had wide experience teaching at Virginia Seminary and College, Lynchburg, Va., 1923-26, at Lincoln University, Mo., 1926-28, Fisk University, 1928-29, and at Howard University from 1929 to date. His volume of verse, _Southern Road_, published in 1932, put him in the advance-guard of younger Negro poets, and, as well, the then new school of American regionalist literature. In 1937, Professor Brown was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing and among other things, will complete for publication his second volume of verse, “_No Hiding Place_.” Since 1936, he has been directing editor on Negro materials of the _Federal Writers’ Project_ at Washington headquarters. For the last five years, his literary book review comments in _Opportunity_ under the caption: “_The Literary Scene_,” have revealed a critical talent of sane but progressive and unacademic tendencies,--a point of view that the reader will find characteristically carried through in this provocative and masterly study.

ALAIN LOCKE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

Introduction 1

I. EARLY APPEARANCES 5

II. THE PLANTATION TRADITION: PRO-SLAVERY
FICTION 17

III. ANTISLAVERY FICTION 31

IV. RECONSTRUCTION: THE GLORIOUS
SOUTH 49

V. RECONSTRUCTION: THE NOT SO GLORIOUS
SOUTH 64

VI. OLD PATHS 84

VII. COUNTER-PROPAGANDA--BEGINNING
REALISM 100

VIII. REALISM AND THE FOLK 115

IX. THE URBAN SCENE 131

X. SOUTHERN REALISM 151

XI. NEW ROADS 169

XII. HISTORICAL FICTION 189