Sterling A Brown

Sterling A. Brown's achievement and influence in the field of American literature and culture are unquestionably significant. His poetry has been translated into Spanish, French, German, and Russian and has been read in literary circles throughout the world. He is also one of the principal architects of black criticism. His critical essays and books are seminal works that give an insider's perspective of literature by and about blacks. Leopold Sedar Senghor, who became familiar with Brown's poetry and criticism in the 1920s and 1930s, called him "an original militant of Negritude, a precursor of our movement." Yet Joanne V. Gabbin's book, originally published in 1985, remains the only study of Brown's work and influence. Gabbin sketches Brown's life, drawing on personal interviews and viewing his achievements as a poet, critic, and cultural griot. She analyzes in depth the formal and thematic qualities of his poetry, revealing his subtle adaptation of song forms, especially the blues. To articulate the aesthetic principles Brown recognized in the writings of black authors, Gabbin explores his identification of the various elements that have come together to create American culture.

Using oral history and the printed word, Sterling A. Brown set out during the Second World War to capture the response of African Americans, primarily living in the South, to America's involvement in the war and how it affected them. These responses, brought together in extended, non-fiction essays of many different types, illustrate the diversity of opinions in the Black South about the war and the war period in America. For nearly sixty years, the excerpts that were never published languished in Brown's manuscript collection at Howard University. Now, for the first time, all of the completed pieces of unpublished writings are combined with the few published sections into the book that Brown envisioned. The legacy Brown left us is not only a superb portrait of the way in which African Americans of the mid-century talked and lived; he also provided a methodology that oral and written historians will find extremely useful. This is clearly a document from another time, as its now outdated title reminds us, but it reveals a world that still informs our sense of ourselves as a nation. In fact, it is an unforgettable history, which Brown has cast in a bright, elucidating new light.

Essays on African-American politics, literature and music by Sterling A. Brown (1901-1989), which point out the biases against black Americans in white cultural expression and argue for a recognition of the cultural contributions of African Americans.

Arguably the greatest African American poet of the century, Sterling Brown was instrumental in bringing the traditions of African American folk life to readers all over the world. This is the definitive collection of Brown's poems, and the only edition available in the United States.

Using oral history and the printed word, Sterling A. Brown set out during the Second World War to capture the response of African Americans, primarily living in the South, to America's involvement in the war and how it affected them. These responses, brought together in extended, non-fiction essays of many different types, illustrate the diversity of opinions in the Black South about the war and the war period in America. For nearly sixty years, the excerpts that were never published languished in Brown's manuscript collection at Howard University. Now, for the first time, all of the completed pieces of unpublished writings are combined with the few published sections into the book that Brown envisioned. The legacy Brown left us is not only a superb portrait of the way in which African Americans of the mid-century talked and lived; he also provided a methodology that oral and written historians will find extremely useful. This is clearly a document from another time, as its now outdated title reminds us, but it reveals a world that still informs our sense of ourselves as a nation. In fact, it is an unforgettable history, which Brown has cast in a bright, elucidating new light.

Sterling A. Brown’s poetry and aesthetics are central to a proper understanding of African American art and politics of the early twentieth century. This study redefines the relationship between modernism and the New Negro era in light of Brown’s uniquely hybrid poetry and vision of a heterodox, pluralist modernism. Brown, also a folklorist and critic, saw the Harlem Renaissance and modernism as interactive rather than mutually exclusive and perceived the New Negro era as the dawning of African American modernity. Reading Brown’s three collections of poetry in light of their respective historical contexts, Sanders examines the ways in which Brown reconfigured black being and created alternative conceptual space for African Americans amid the prevailing racial discourses of American culture. Brown’s poetics call for revised conceptions of the Harlem Renaissance, black identity, artistic expression, and modernity that recognize the range, depth, and complexity of African American life.

For more than sixty years, Sterling A. Brown -- poet, folklorist, cultural critic, literary historian, teacher, and raconteur -- profoundly shaped the development of African American literary and cultural studies. A collection of new and exemplary writings, this volume represents an unprecedented effort to recover, reassess, and reassert Brown's enduring significance for contemporary scholars, students, and nonacademic readers. This engaging recuperative project is structured around four distinctive features: new and previously published essays that sum up contemporary approaches to the various genres of Brown's works; interviews with Brown and with his acquaintances and contemporaries; two discographies of source material that innovatively extend the study of Brown's acclaimed poetry; and an updated version of the most comprehensive bibliography of Brown's published writings. "After Winter" aptly demonstrates how Brown, in words from one of his familiar poems, continues to "just get hold of us dataway." -- From publisher's description.