Reading the Renaissance
Black Women's Literary Reception and Taste in Chicago, 1932-1953
From 1932 to 1953, during the Black Chicago Renaissance, numerous literary events were held within and for the city’s Black community. In book clubs, public forums, print reviews, little magazines, local programming, and other public venues, Black women in particular debated the role of literature in racial uplift efforts, set literary standards, and acted as community gatekeepers for cultural production during a time known as the Black Chicago Renaissance. Through these inspiring efforts, a mix of publishers, well-known authors, and everyday readers significantly fostered a robust literary culture in the Windy City.
Reading the Renaissance constructs a reception history of the Black women who read and reviewed, published and promoted, and collected and curated literature of the era. Mary Unger interprets how local figures such as Vivian G. Harsh, Ora Morrow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Browning, Fern Gayden, and Margaret Walker cultivated particular literary tastes through collective acts of reading and reception. She does so by recovering a network of readers, book clubs, literary magazines, civic programs, and book businesses that Black women created, led, and transformed during the early 1930s through the early 1950s in Bronzeville, Chicago’s predominantly Black South Side neighborhood.
This illuminating work includes close readings of texts alongside letters, scrapbooks, meeting minutes, reviews, and other ephemera of local reading practices to show how Black women facilitated diverse strategies of reading while instructing community members how to engage a variety of print cultures at the time. Unger demonstrates how Black women readers influenced individual authors as well as the norms and expectations of African American literature more broadly, becoming important (yet too often overlooked) players in American literary history.
‘Unger argues convincingly that Black women’s experiences as librarians, writers, booksellers, book club members, and readers were both personal and political, using compelling archival material and nuanced analysis. She positions their literary practices as part of a long and continuing tradition of Black women’s uses of language, literacy, and literature, while remaining in conversation with Chicago history as well as general reading and reception history. Reading the Renaissance reflects the complexities of the lived, but often ignored or marginalized, experiences of Black women who led but also sustained Black Chicago’s reading cultures.’—Shawn Anthony Christian, author of The Harlem Renaissanceand the Idea of a New Negro Reader
‘In this deeply researched book, Mary Unger provides a missing link between the Harlem Renaissance and the dramatic proliferation of Black readers and writers later in the 20th century. Unger’s study provides a wealth of neglected material and makes a substantial contribution to a history of African American reading and reception.’—Barbara Hochman, author of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851–1911
This Waiting for Love
Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance
Edited by Verner D. Mitchell; Foreword by Cheryl A. Wall
Measuring the Harlem Renaissance
The U.S. Census, African American Identity, and Literary Form
By Michael Soto
