There are ghosts in Chicago: the ghosts of writers past.
This weekend, they’re moving amongst the living writers, the ones who are filling the streets of the South Loop for Printers Row Lit Fest, June 4-5, sponsored by the Tribune. Those living scribblers, though, can speak for themselves. Let’s focus on the writerly wraiths.
They include authors such as Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) and Richard Wright (1908-1960) — writers who were identified with Chicago, who came of intellectual age here and who changed American literature forever.
Their creations have been celebrated for decades — plays by Hansberry, poems by Brooks, prose by Wright — but the chance to see them as energetic and inspired writers, as working Chicagoans, comes courtesy of an important new book by Lawrence P. Jackson, “The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics 1934-1960” (Princeton University Press).
Jackson, a professor of English and African-American Studies at Emory University, grew up in Baltimore but spent summers in Chicago visiting his cousins, he recalls. As a scholar, he began to notice that the Harlem Renaissance “really overwhelms the study of African-American literature in the 20th century.”
Yet an equally crucial period — the one between the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and ’30s and the Black Arts movement in the 1960s — was largely unexplored.
His book rescues that era, reminding us that in the 1940s and ’50s, literature by African-Americans was not only politically significant but also popular among mainstream audiences. This literature “prepared the ground for the militant writers of the 1960s and the aggressive rejection of American liberal ideals,” Jackson writes in his book, adding, “The modernists of the 1940s and early 1950s had redeemed a historical past that enabled black writers to challenge more fully the prominence of the Western artistic tradition itself, a move that began to question the value of integration and cut against the assimilation politics that was at the core of the 1940s black liberal stand.”
Along the way, Jackson’s book restores Chicago to prominence as a city that bred brilliant writers, critics and social activists.
In other words: You didn’t have to live in New York to change the world.
The writers in “The Indignant Generation,” Jackson says, fell between “the folk artists of the 1920s and the revolutionaries of the 1960s.” African-American writers were caught between those who thought all the work of social justice had been done — after all, slavery had been abolished — and those who knew that the work had really just begun.
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Among the fascinating chapters in “The Indignant Generation” is one titled “The Triumph of Chicago Realism (1938-1940),” that includes this sparkling sentence: “The city of Chicago, a place that has no native tradition of bondage but owed plenty of its character to modern industry, was the apt locale to measure the distance between the whips and shackles of the cotton field and jive-talking Cab Calloway blaring from a jukebox on a street filled with skyscrapers.”
In his final chapter, “Prometheus Unbound,” Jackson discovers striking parallels in the careers of Hansberry and Malcolm X — a pairing that many might find surprising. Not only did they share the same birthday — May 19 — and die within weeks of each other, he notes, but the Chicago-born playwright who was determined to “fight segregation and to uncover black history” and the revolutionary both promulgated “a new understanding of blackness in the imagination.”
A major contribution of Jackson’s admirably thorough study is its reminder that the individuals who now seem like remote historical figures, relegated to textbooks, were once working writers. They were women and men who rose each morning and reached for a pen and a notebook, determined to channel their rage and frustration — as well as their aspirations, their knowledge of beauty — into stories, poems, plays and essays.
As you attend events at Lit Fest this weekend, then, you might pause occasionally and listen for other voices: faint, coming from ever so far away, but still audible. These are the voices of the African-American writers who, in Jackson’s phrase, “yanked the country into a new era.” They did it with their words and their deeds, fueled by their anger and their dreams, and a good many of them lived and worked in Chicago.
Twitter @litkell