Explore the vast range of titles available.

The popular historical novelist and expatriate author Frank Yerby was criticised by his fellow African American writers for his historical novels, which supposedly ignored racial injustice in the interests of commercial success. Yerby’s first attempts to narrate African American history in his fiction were The Dahomean (1971) and its sequel A Darkness at Ingraham’s Crest (1979). However, this article argues that Yerby’s earlier bestseller, The Saracen Blade (1952), set in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries around the Mediterranean basin, wrestles with both modern and medieval perceptions of race and makes claims for a multicultural medievalism that were radical in the early 1950s. As I show, the novel proposes three overlapping models of race and then demonstrates how they are all artificial. Through the novel’s protagonist, Pietro di Donati, Yerby suggests links between modern and medieval constructions of race and the ways in which these constructions are unstable and inadequate in both the present and the past. Yerby’s portrayal of the way race is historically contingent in The Saracen Blade at once undermines the idea of a ‘pre-racial’ innocence, by racialising medieval characters, and questions the idea of ‘racial progress,’ by showing how ostensibly ‘pre-racial’ formations of difference like religion are not so much transcended as re-formulated by modernity.

This essay investigates how racial progressivism intersected with the production of children's literature in the U.S. over the first seven decades of the twentieth century, by using a variety of archival materials preserved in Muriel Fuller's manuscript collection at Hunter College. Fuller, the first literary agent of the African American popular novelist Frank Yerby, was a typical yet very well-connected editor in the juvenile sector from the late 1930s. She was also a leading member of the Children's Book Council (CBC) in the mid-1940s and was just one of dozens of white women charged with shaping the direction of \"juvenile literature\" as this business consolidated over the middle decades of the twentieth century. At midcentury, the CBC's vacillations between embracing and resisting the reform of racial and ethnic depictions dovetailed with much-older, black and interracial attempts to reform children's books. The CBC's rejection of the censorship of children's books that were deemed racially prejudiced, and of collectivist efforts more generally, illuminate the limits of postwar racial reform.

[...]there were natural disasters during the period, such as the earthquake that destroyed Port Royal, Jamaica, on June 7, 1692, which Yerby features in his pirate tale.1 As Mark G. Hanna has demonstrated, piracy had expanded dramatically in the 1680s, and 1696 \"marked the culmination of a number of significant movements, involving trade, warfare, colonial administration, economic policies, and information exchange, that all had an impact on the colonial support of illicit sea marauding\" (223). According to Jan Radway, there are some key components of this genre: 1) the heroine's social identity is destroyed; 2) the heroine reacts antagonistically to an aristocratic male; 3) the aristocratic male responds ambiguously to the heroine; 4) the heroine responds to the hero's behavior with anger or coldness; 5) the hero retaliates by punishing the heroine; 6) the heroine and hero are physically and/or emotionally separated; 7) the hero treats the heroine tenderly; 8) the heroine responds warmly to the hero's acts of tenderness; 9) the heroine reinterprets the hero's previous behavior as the product of previous hurt; 10) the hero proposes/openly declares his love for/demonstrates his unwavering commitment to the heroine with a supreme act of tenderness; 11) the heroine responds sexually and emotionally; and 12) the heroine's identity is restored (Radway 187). Fernand Braudel's advice to pay attention to details of trade when rewriting history finds application here as Yerby lists cargoes, from tallow and hides to human beings. [...]it is on the sea itself, rather than the separate island sequences or those in Cartagena, where Yerby chooses to probe the crosscurrents of colonial history and complex identities. First published in 1837 (the first printed African American short story), it is narrated by an old black man who tells of a beautiful African girl, Laïssa, who is sold to the planter Alfred, who rapes her.

Juan González de Luaces (Luanco-Asturias, 22 de abril de 1906-Barcelona, 23 de junio de 1963), pues éste, que era hijo del escritor, filósofo y traductor asturiano Edmundo González Blanco (1877-1938), fue también un traductor fecundo, plural y acreditado, ya que sus versiones aún se citan hoy como \"clásicas\", lo que indica que eran modélicas y que han resistido muy bien el paso del tiempo. Una mujer de Lisboa, de Joaquim Paço d'Arcos, Barcelona, Luis Miracle, \"Centauro\", 1942, 268 páginas. 4. Vida de Jesucristo, de Giuseppe Ricciotti, Barcelona, Luis Miracle, 1944, 756 páginas. 31. Hudson renace, de Claude Houghton, Barcelona, Luis Miracle, \"Centauro\", 1945, 328 páginas. 43. Eclipse, de Alan Moorehead, Barcelona, José Janés, \"Los libros de nuestro tiempo\", 1946, 213 páginas. 66. Los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica explorados, descubiertos de nuevo y explicados, de George Mikes, Barcelona, Luis Miracle, 1949, 164 páginas. 97. Cómo venderse a sí mismo, Barcelona, Luis Miracle, \"Biblioteca universal Miracle\", 1968, 371 páginas.

This dissertation examines the generations of popular black writers that initiated the process of desegregating the U.S. publishing industry from 1919 – 1972. The study argues that by exploring their and others’ myriad, fitful efforts to produce “universal” American culture between these years, an historical genealogy for “African American literature,” created by African Americans, emerges. Because modern black cultural nationalism would not take off—or be appreciated or supported in earnest—until the mid-1960s, the bulk of the study traces the shifting and capricious “raceless” media landscape African American writers navigated from 1940 through the 1950s. By working against popular and scholarly works that consider “Negro literature” in racially segregated terms, the dissertation questions how black writers, who increasingly sought white Americans as possible audiences between these years, developed new techniques as they established, validated, and asserted their humanism.

Established by President Roosevelt in 1935 as part of the New Deal, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) put thousands of unemployed professionals to work documenting American life during the Depression. Federal writers—many of whom would become famous, including Ralph Ellison, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, and Dorothy West—collected reams of oral histories and folklore, and produced hundreds of guides to cities and states across the country. Yet, despite both the Project's extraordinary volume of writing and its unprecedented support for writers, few critics have examined it from a literary perspective. Instead, the FWP has been almost exclusively in the possession of historians who have rightly perceived its unique place in Depression-era history. This dissertation attempts to fill this critical void by investigating the FWP's contributions to American writing—African American writing, in particular—in the postwar era and beyond. Drawing on archival documents, critical histories, and the work of select FWP writers, I explore how this relief program helped to pioneer a new documentary form that fused literary techniques with anthropological practices in an effort to showcase the unique voices of marginalized Americans. No longer sociological specimens or symbolic agents for reform, these subjects became empowered \"selves,\" in part because of the FWP's efforts to create a grassroots literary methodology that privileged self-expression and the first-person perspective. Scholars have traditionally framed the FWP as a Depression-era initiative whose relevance died alongside the political and social currents that helped produce it. However, I contend that by aiming their documentary lenses so precisely on individuals and their unique voices, FWP writers ultimately eschewed the social realism of 1930s culture in favor of themes surrounding personal identity and the psychological dimensions of social engagement.

A best-selling, exceptionally popular African American author, Frank Yerby experienced five varied phases in his literary career. A profile of the writer is offered.

[...]African American intellectuals have been astute observers of White America, borne of the need to \"cope and survive in a white supremacist society\" (hooks 38). [...]somewhat predictably, within pages of rejecting the bifurcated consciousness that had structured her identity, Odalie dies giving \"birth to a stillborn child - a daughter\" (237). [...]just before she expires she also cleanses the White home of Stephen's \"dark\" distraction by securing his promise that he will \"never consort\" with his pale mistress, Desiree, again (237). [...]although interesting for the potential she suggests for White womanhood to liberate itself from the lenticular logic of race and to reproduce Whiteness differently, Odalie ultimately chooses to cling to a false consciousness even into death. According to Stephan Thernstrom, editor of the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, the term \"Creole\" initially referred to \"Louisianans of French and Spanish descent,\" an ethnically-specifically \"White\" people who sought \"to distinguish themselves from the AngloAmericans who started to move into Louisiana\" after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.

In the end, Stephen embraces the idea of being a liberal white citizen who is critical of the Civil War and the color line in general, a citizen empowered to help usher the country into a better and more hopeful world of interracial understanding and cooperation.