Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. List of Illustrations ix
4. Acknowledgments xi
5. Introduction Irredeemable Promise: The Bittersweet Career of J. Saunders Redding 1
6. Chapter One Three Swinging Sisters: Harlem, Howard, and the South Side (1934–1936) 15
7. Chapter Two The Black Avant-Garde between Left and Right (1935–1939) 42
8. Chapter Three A New Kind of Challenge (1936–1939) 68
9. Chapter Four The Triumph of Chicago Realism (1938–1940) 93
10. Chapter Five Bigger Thomas among the Liberals (1940–1943) 123
11. Chapter Six Friends in Need of Negroes: Bucklin Moon and Thomas Sancton (1942–1945) 149
12. Chapter Seven “Beating That Boy”: White Writers, Critics, Editors, and the Liberal Arts Coalition (1944–1949) 178
13. Chapter Eight Afroliberals and the End of World War II (1945–1946) 196
14. Chapter Nine Black Futilitarianists and the Welcome Table (1945–1947) 219
15. Chapter Ten The Peril of Something New, or, the Decline of Social Realism (1947–1948) 258
16. Chapter Eleven The Negro New Liberal Critic and the Big Little Magazine (1948–1949) 275
17. Chapter Twelve The Communist Dream of African American Modernism (1947–1950) 297
18. Chapter Thirteen The Insinuating Poetics of the Mainstream (1949–1950) 323
19. Chapter Fourteen Still Looking for Freedom (1949–1954) 342
20. Chapter Fifteen The Expatriation: The Price of Brown and the New Bohemians (1952–1955) 379
21. Chapter Sixteen Liberal Friends No More: The Rubble of White Patronage (1956–1958) 411
22. Chapter Seventeen The End of the Negro Writer (1955–1960) 444
23. Chapter Eighteen The Reformation of Black New Liberals (1958–1960) 470
24. Chapter Nineteen Prometheus Unbound (1958–1960) 485
25. Notes 511
26. Index 559