Table Of Content

THE CONCISE OXFORD COMPANION TO African American Literature ADVISERS Michael Awkward Herman Beavers Cedric Gael Bryant ArleneLClift-Pellow JoAnneCornwell Thadious M. Davis Gerald Early Joanne V.Gabbin Beverly Guy-Sheftall Helen R. Houston Gerald Jaynes Nellie Y. McKay Sandra Pouchet Paquet JosdPiedra Arnold Rampersad John W.Roberts John C. Shields Clyde Taylor Kenny Jackson Williams Richard Yarborough THE CONCISE OXFORD COMPANION TO African American Literature EDITORS William L. Andrews Frances Smith Foster Trudier Harris OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2001 OXPORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Bombay Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Dares Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 2001 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4314 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available ISBNO-19-513883-X 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 42 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Contents Introduction vii Contributors xiii The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature Appendix 457 Editors 473 Index 474 This page intentionally left blank Introduction Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker once said that if she were stranded on a desert island and had only one book to read, she would be content with a copy of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Hurston's novel tells the story of an early twentieth-century black woman of the South, Janie Crawford, and the people she encounters in her lifelong quest for self-determination and fulfillment. With her third husband, a guitar-playing bluesman named Tea Cake (who is just as sweet as his name), Janie achieves her goal. Tea Cake stands beside Janie in her efforts to define freedom and responsibility and to trade materialism for the more spiritual things in life. The compelling drama through which Hurston's novel, completed in only six weeks, brings Janie, her lovers, her friends, and an entire African American community into imperishable vitality is one of the treasures of African American literature. Walker's discovery of Hurston greatly influenced her life and her literary career. Like Walker, through the doorway opened by a novel such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, countless readers have discovered the ever-expanding library of African American literature, founded in the examples of Phillis Wheatley, a young enslaved poet in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, and such outspoken fugitive slaves as William and Ellen Craft and Frederick Douglass in the nineteenth century, and ex- tending forward to figures such as dramatists May Miller and Willis Richardson, poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, and novelists Nella Larsen and Richard Wright in the early twentieth century. Hurston has pointed readers into the richness of the 1950s, when James Baldwin and Lorraine Hans- berry gave us, respectively, Gabriel Grimes in Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953) and Mama Lena Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (1959). In contemporary times readers encounter Randall Kenan, a North Carolina author, who tells of a sixteen-year-old boy who tries to escape his homosexuality by using ancient incantations that he hopes will transform him into a bird. They read Toni Morrison's evocation of a baby ghost in Beloved (1987) who haunts a family in Ohio and J. California Cooper's tale of a character in Family (1991) whose attempted suicide leaves her in an immortal limbo state watching over her family through hundreds of years. Whether in the realistic realms of a Hurston, Baldwin, or Hansberry or in the fantastic worlds that Kenan, Morrison, and Cooper create or in the many nu- anced dimensions in between, African American literature enthralls readers from Maine to California, Minnesota to Florida, Spain to South Africa, Italy to Germany, Canada to Jamaica, Japan and Korea. In its national and international reach, African American literature has attained an unprecedented level of popularity, critical notice, and scholarly inquiry. Since 1970 Rita Dove, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker have joined Gwendolyn Brooks and Ralph Ellison as winners of prestigious honors such as the Pulitzer Prize, the National and American Book Awards, and, in Morrison's case, the Nobel Prize for Literature. As the readership of African American writing expands and waxes increasingly multiethnic, it is rare to find a library (particularly in schools and universities) that does not collect, or a general-purpose bookstore that does not market, literary work by African Americans. In the acad- emy, the reading and study of African American literature are no longer relegated to what once was vii viii INTRODUCTION called Black Studies. African American writers play increasingly prominent roles in newly reconsti- tuted American literature and American Studies, as well as women's studies and ethnic studies, curric- ula. In the late twentieth century, research in African American literature and the publication of reference books, especially detailed bibliographies of both primary and secondary writing and biographical dictionaries, have given readers and students of African American literature much valuable information. The richness of African American literature and the expanding worldwide attention to it stimu- lated the conception and eventual publication of The Oxford Companion to African American Litera- ture in 1997, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. The Oxford Com- panion to African American Literature is a comprehensive reference volume devoted to the texts and the historical and cultural contexts of African American literature. A big book for a big subject, the Companion can answer a wide range of questions on everything from Afrocentricity to Zami, the autobiography of the poet Audre Lorde. What you can't do with the 850-page Companion, however, is put it in a backpack or a book bag. Thus in an effort to reach an ever-widening audience with a more streamlined, portable reference resource, the editors of the original Companion have created this ab- breviated Concise Companion to African American Literature. The Concise Companion has the same purpose and plan and follows the same scholarly standards of the first Companion. The Concise Com- panion is simply more tightly focused on the essential elements of any great literature, its most notable authors and their greatest works. The Concise Companion to African American Literature highlights the writers and the writing that have made African American literature valuable and distinctive for more than 250 years. Aware of the dismissal of so much black American writing for so many years because it did not conform to prevail- ing aesthetic or critical assumptions, our understanding of literature is not restricted to the traditional belletristic genres of poetry, fiction, and drama. In the Concise Companion to African American Litera- ture, you will find articles on writers who distinguished themselves as slave narrators, essayists, auto- biographers, historians, journalists, and orators as well as those who are chiefly remembered for their novels, their verse, or their contributions to the theater. In addition to the comments on texts that ap- pear in the biographical articles, the Concise Companion to African American Literature provides more than 150 articles that describe and appraise the texts that we as editors consider to be major works in the African American literary tradition. The largest genre of works in this category is fiction; plot out- lines of more than eighty African American novels may be found in this volume. An equal number of entries is allotted to key texts of poetry, drama, autobiography, essay collections, and children's and young adult literature. In order to recognize the importance of hybrid and experimental texts in African American literature, past and present, the Concise Companion contains a wealth of articles on unforgettable and yet hard-to-classify texts such as David Walker's Appeal, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, The Souls of Black Folk, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. To provide readers with a firm overview of the length and breadth of African American literary history, the five-part, 10,000-word essay on Literary History that is a hallmark of The Oxford Companion to African American Literature appears in full in the Concise Companion. Biographies of writers comprise the largest single category of articles in this volume, from little known figures such as Octavia V. Rogers Albert to celebrated authors such as August Wilson. More than 242 writers receive individual biographical treatment in the Concise Companion to African Amer- ican Literature. Biographical articles vary in length, from 200 words for less prominent authors such as William Johnson to more than 2,000 words for centrally important writers such as James Baldwin and INTRODUCTION ix Toni Morrison. Many factors influence the lengths of biographical articles, among them the amount of information available on a given writer's life, the editors'estimate of the extent and importance of each writer's contribution to African American literature, and the space we could allot to biographies within the scaled-down framework of the Concise Companion. Although there are fewer biographies in the Concise Companion than in the Companion, the Concise Companion's biographies have several enhanced features. First, the most significant literary work that contemporary writers have published and the prizes and awards they have won since the appearance of the original Companion are listed in the biographical entries in the Concise Companion. Second, the most significant critical and scholarly work on individual African American writers that has been published since the original Companion is included in the bibliographies that append the biographies in the Concise Companion. Thus the Con- cise Companion keeps the story of the writers and the scholarship on the writers as current as is possi- ble for today's readers. In addition to biographies of writers, the Concise Companion to African American Literature also includes compact biographical treatments and cultural assessments of a considerable number of per- sons—musicians, sports figures, political leaders, activists, and artists—whose presence in and/or influence on African American literature is of such a magnitude as to be noteworthy. Thus John Coltrane, Marcus Garvey, John Brown, Jackie Robinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Harriet Tubman, to mention just a few figures who have achieved virtually iconic status in African American literature, are profiled in such a way as to lead the reader to literary texts significantly influenced by the person under consideration. HOW TO USE THIS BOOK Embarking upon the adventure of this volume, you will quickly discover that African American literature is much more than the protest tradition so frequently associated with Richard Wright or Ann Petry. Have you wondered who the detective novelist is whom President Bill Clinton identified as one of his favorite writers? Look up Walter Mosley and find out what he wrote. Are you curious about the science fiction of MacArthur Prize-winning Octavia Butler and the "Dean of Science Fiction," Samuel Delany? They are both in the Concise Companion along with a separate article on Butler's celebrated novel Kindred (1979). In these pages the children's fiction of Arna Bontemps, Walter Dean Myers, Alice Childress, and Virginia Hamilton is discussed, as well as the courageous stories of escape and en- durance epitomized in narratives such as Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966) and Alex Haley's Roots (1976). If you elect a regional approach to the literature, you can meet Raymond Andrews, Tina McEl- roy Ansa, and Brenda Marie Osbey on southern soil; Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Church Terrell, Ralph El- lison, and Claude Brown in urban territory; and Al Young, Joyce Carol Thomas, and Ishmael Reed in the West. If your interests run to modernist or contemporary stylistic experimenters, key figures such as Jean Toomer, Carlene Hatcher Polite, Xam Wilson Cartier, and Trey Ellis are all here. If poetry is where you begin, be sure to read the articles on Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, and Yusef Komunyakaa. Notice that major volumes of poetry by Wheatley—Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773); by Dunbar—Majors and Minors (1895) and Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896); by Brooks—A Street in Bronzeville (1945), for instance; and by Dove— Thomas and Beulah (1986)—receive separate treatments in the Concise Companion. You can also find and trace the development of African American poetry in the article on Literary History. If drama strikes your fancy, you can look up individual dramatists, such as August Wilson. Find out how many Pulitzer