This book charts Fitzgerald's use of racial stereotypes to encode the dual nature of his literary ambition: his desire to be on the one hand a popular American entertainer, and on the other to make his mark among the elite members of an international literary field. Taking his cue from some under-appreciated stories, Michael Nowlin argues that Fitzgerald's early use of tropes from blackface minstrelsy anticipated his race-inflected treatment of divided artist figures in the major novels from The Beautiful and Damned to the unfinished The Love of the Last Tycoon. At issue in all these novels,...
This book charts Fitzgerald's use of racial stereotypes to encode the dual nature of his literary ambition: his desire to be on the one hand a popular...
James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) exemplified the ideal of the American public intellectual as a writer, educator, songwriter, diplomat, key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and first African American executive of the NAACP. Originally published anonymously in 1912, Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is considered one of the foundational works of twentieth-century African American literature, and its themes and forms have been taken up by other writers, from Ralph Ellison to Teju Cole.
Johnson's novel provocatively engages with political and cultural...
James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) exemplified the ideal of the American public intellectual as a writer, educator, songwriter, diplomat, key figure ...
