Literary Ambition and the African American Novel

This book shows how African American literature emerged as a world-recognized literature: less as the product of a seamless tradition of writers signifying upon their ancestors and more the product of three generations of ambitious, competitive individuals aiming to be the first great African American writer. It charts a canon of fictional landmarks, beginning with The House Behind the Cedars and culminating in the National Book Award-Winner Invisible Man, and tells the compelling stories of the careers of key African American writers, including Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. These writers worked within the white-dominated, commercial, Eurocentric literary field to put African American literature on the world literary map, while struggling to transcend the cultural expectations attached to their position as 'Negro authors'. Literary Ambition and the African American Novel tells as much about the novels that these writers could not publish as it does about their major achievements.

Introduction; 1. 'The first Negro novelist': Charles Chesnutt's point of view and the emergence of African American literature; 2. James Weldon Johnson's dream of literary greatness and his groundwork for an African American literary renaissance; 3. The strange literary career of Jean Toomer; 4. Wallace Thurman's judgment and 'this obvious rush toward modernism'; 5. Zora Neale Hurston and the great unwritten; 6. Richard Wright's compromises: radicalism and celebrity as paths to literary freedom; 7. 'Literary to a fault': the singular triumph of Ralph Ellison; Conclusion.

Michael Nowlin is a specialist in American literature and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He is the author of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness (2007) and is the editor of editions of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (2007) and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (2002). He has also published articles in Modernism/Modernity, American Literature, African American Review, and Studies in American Fiction.