Necessary Anthologies

...But the bibliography in Images of the Negro is the most available, comprehensive, and current that we have on writing about Negro characters and authors...

...The only essay on poetry deals with Langston Hughes...

...Soon One Morning: New Writing by American Negroes...

...The essay is in many respects thorough and not wholly unsympathetic toward its subject, yet I was struck by McDowell's comment about what the Southern novelists left out in their desire to idealize the Negro character: "Although they mention such characteristics, the early novelists failed to present adequately [the Negro's] optimism, his native humor, his musical talent, his pietism, his indolence, his deceit, and his irresponsibility...

...Clarke seems to have concentrated on the strength of their racial protest...

...The others are Hugh Glos-ter's Negro Voices in American Fiction (1948), Robert Bone's The Negro Novel in America (1958), and Herbert Hill's Anger and Beyond (1966...

...and few scholars, critics or teachers have given due attention to Negro writers or to the Negro in our literature...

...The general reader, who may not dwell on the function of literature, should find both absorbing and enlightening, if necessarily uneven because they are representative...

...I am disturbed because the word "Negro" has market value, and the degree of its value is a measure of the degree to which its referent is something strange and apart...

...Hughes also errs in this direction, but his acknowledgements identify most of the sources...

...Hughes selected Dunbar's "Scapegoat," about a Negro politician and his relations with other Negro politicians and the downtown machine...

...355 pp...

...Still, the reality is that few people know the Negro writers beyond, at best, Wright, Baldwin and Ellison...

...his book merely gives us the copyright dates and permissions from authors and publishers...

...I am disturbed because I cannot believe authors and editors are so incredibly naive as to suppose they have caught something between the covers of these books essential enough to give us knowledge at once about Harlem...

...His insolence, his meanness and grossness, his essential barbarism were suppressed...

...There has been little interest in Negro authors other than very recent ones, while the Negro characters of authors currently considered worthy of critical attention fare only slightly better...

...the latter describes how a particular character functions within a power system...

...Reviewed by DONALD GIBSON Assistant Professor of English Wayne State University There is something a little disturbing and depressing about books that have the word "Negro" in their titles...

...6.50...

...Watts, Ralph Bunche, Elijah Mohammed, John Henry, Edward Brooke and Stokely Carmichael...

...The Langston Hughes anthology??by far the better one??announces in its title that it contains the "best" among stories by Negro writers...

...Clarke has nothing by Ralph Ellison, and only one excerpt from Go Tell It on the Mountain to represent James Baldwin...

...A reader might well ask, too, why greater attention was not paid to the image of the Negro in American poetry...

...One wishes for a state of affairs that would make "Negro" books unnecessary...

...Hence, though it is placed logically in context between Theodore Gross's "The Negro in the Literature of Reconstruction" and Arden's "The Early Harlem Novel," one cannot help but feel that its relation to what precedes and follows is only tangential...

...Those more committed to the world, and so inclined to feel literature should have social significance, will enjoy one or the other depending upon their degree of commitment...

...It contains two new essays by the editors, Gross' excellently researched and informative introduction, "Stereotype to Archetype: The Negro in American Literary Criticism," and Hardy's study of the Negroes in the fiction of Eudora Welty...

...all other selections have been printed elsewhere...

...Save in the work of Simms and an occasional veiled reference elsewhere, no one recognized his grumbling, his rebelliousness, and his extreme licentiousness, which some historians suggest almost destroyed the race...

...The editors divide the book into two main sections, one called "Traditions" and the other, unfortunately, "Individual Talents" (no reference to Eliot's famous essay seems intended...

...I purposely omit Carl M. Hughes' The Negro Novelist, 1953, because of its limitations...

...Famous American Negro Poets...

...IMAGES OF THE NEGRO IN AMERICAN LITERATURE Edited by Seymour L. Gross and John Edward Hardy University of Chicago Press 321 pp...

...Perhaps the section was printed separately prior to the publication of the novel...

...They supply knowledge about and should elicit study in all area ignored by most people professionally involved with literature...

...Hughes' collection is, as the dust jacket says, "the most complete and authoritative collection of its kind in the English language...

...The material covered in Tremain McDowell's "The Negro in the Southern Novel Prior to 1850" (1926) bears a second look today...

...For some reason the focus of the book is almost entirely on fiction??except for the essay about the Colonial period where material is drawn from diaries, letters and other non-literary sources...

...Esthetes, art-for-art's-sake people, will probably not thoroughly enjoy either collection, but the Hughes will likely prove more satisfactory...

...As provocative and insightful an essay as Leslie Fielder's discussion of the Negro in literature from Poe to Faulkner must necessarily leave out a great deal given its original intentions...

...These essays are in varying degrees concerned with the Negro image??although Marcus Klein's essay on The Invisible Man, an explication of the novel, and Robert Bone's smug and condescending essay on Baldwin's fiction do not focus specifically on the question...

...Now, with the publication of these two collections of short stories, a good amount is again available: though neither anthology offers more than a single story by any one author, they will at least introduce most readers to a host of unknown writers...

...There is no indication that Baldwin's piece is from the novel, and the last line of the story mysteriously differs from the novel's text...

...A case in point is the selection from the work of Paule Marshall: "Barbados," the Hughes choice, is demonstrably superior to "Reena," John Henrik Clarke's choice...

...Despite the fact that these anthologies include many of the same authors, it should be stressed that very few stories are duplicated...

...Thus Clarke's book contains a story by Paul Lawrence Dunbar called "The Lynching," about a Negro lynched for a crime he did not commit...

...rather it suggests the need for a single or fuller history of the image of the Negro in American literature...

...Images of the Negro, welcome and worthwhile as it is, underlines the serious gaps in research and criticism in the field...

...On the other hand, given the attitudes of generations of scholars, critics and teachers toward material by and concerning Negroes, these three books are useful and necessary...

...Hughes picked less strident and generally better conceived and executed material, though I do not mean to suggest that he employed only esthetic criteria (for a long time he has been committed to the idea that literature should have a social function...

...How difficult it is to imagine an anthology titled American German Poetry or Famous American Irish Poets...

...Perhaps the publication of these three books signals the end of a long period of ignorance and fear about our past and present...

...5.95...

...And recently there have been many such books: Who Speaks for the Negro?: American Negro Poetry...

...Images of the Negro in American Literature is one of the four important scholarly and/or critical books published in the past 20 years having to do with literature by or about Negroes...

...If so, that points up another limitation of Clarke's anthology, a limitation which will not disturb the general reader as much as the individual who may want to locate sources...

...I can say, however, that in the many instances where the anthologies overlap??Where they include stories by the same author??Hughes' offerings are consistently the more pleasing esthetically...

...It contains more stories than the Clarke anthology (47-31) and is more comprehensive...

...A comparison of the anthologies demonstrates the importance of the editor...

...I am depressed when I have to ask myself what is a "Negro" poem, novel or short story because the answer invariably reminds me of the extent to which the American ideal of brotherhood in a democratic society remains unrealized...

...The second explores the works of particular authors in which Negroes play a prominent role, including Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Langston Hughes, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin...

...The former story protests against lynching...

...This is not a negative comment on the book, however...

...Because the articles describing the image of the Negro at different times are written by different people with completely different perspectives, there is a lack of continuity...

...I cannot say whether Hughes' claim is or is not justified, for I simply have not read all of the short stories (or even a majority) by the 47 writers included...

...The two editors apparently used somewhat different criteria in sorting out the vast number of stories they must have read...

...The first section contains general studies about the Negro in the literature of various periods up to the present...

...The American Negro Reference Book...

...American Chinese Poetry is a possibility, but that's depressing too...

...One of the obvious reasons for the situation is that so much Negro literature??even the best works??has for a long time been out of print...

...Images does not pretend to give a precise history of the subject, but it does present the material in chronological fashion, beginning with Milton Cantor's "The Image of the Negro in Colonial Literature," moving through the 19th century into the 20th, and concluding with Robert Bone's "The Novels of James Baldwin...