“Black talk is again on the move in Lover Man, a newly reissued collection of melancholy stories by Alston Anderson originally published in 1959,” writes Darryl Pinckney in a review from our July 20, 2023, issue. Pinckney situates Anderson in the tradition of black American novelists who write with vernacular speech and incorporate folklore into their work, and who are often obliged to grapple with a double bind: “even if not racist, dialect is still racialized speech. It contains the problem of having to overcome the assumption that racial distinctions will be demeaning for black people.”
Starting with the poet and novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pinckney follows the development of black storytelling in American letters from Zora Neale Hurston (“for her, folklore, ‘the boiled-down juice of human living,’ was movable, renewable”) to Amiri Baraka, from Ralph Ellison (“language had been used to describe the reality of black people, but Ellison concluded that language itself was reality”) to Toni Morrison, and finds in Anderson’s stories a striking “absence of judgment” and a “faultless” ear for written speech.
Below, alongside Pinckney’s essay, we have collected a selection from our archives about Zora Neale Hurston, Amiri Baraka (written by Ralph Ellison), Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, and Claude McKay.
Darryl Pinckney
Black Talk on the Move
Lover Man, a newly reissued collection of melancholy stories by Alston Anderson, one of the lost names of black literature, depicts small-town southern life and postwar migration to the North.
Darryl Pinckney
In Sorrow’s Kitchen
“Hurston exhibited a strong inclination toward the iconoclastic, but the shifts in her opinions and the elusiveness of her personality sometimes make it hard to see her for what she was, a black woman ahead of her historical moment.”
Ralph Ellison
The Blues
“[Baraka] sees the development of jazz and the blues as results of the more varied forms of experience made available to the freed-man. By the twentieth century the blues divided and became, on the one hand, a professionalized form of entertainment, while remaining, on the other, a form of folklore.”
Thomas R. Edwards
Ghost Story
“Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure of our national literature. She has written a work that brings to the darkest corners of American experience the wisdom, and the courage, to know them as they are.”
Christopher Benfey
Richard Wright, Masaoka Shiki, and the Haiku of Confinement
“Wright feverishly wrote some 4,000 haiku, from which he selected 817 as worthy of publication. Julia Wright chose one of the poems, a metaphorical self-portrait, as Wright’s epitaph: ‘Burning out its time, / And timing its own burning, / One lonely candle.’”
Colin Grant
On the Waterfront
“McKay was determined to write the unfettered truth, as he saw it: ‘I make my Negro characters yarn and backbite and fuck like people the world over.’ In Romance in Marseille he revels in conveying the quayside’s hedonistic and bacchanalian spirit.”
