A rediscovery of forgotten talent overshadowed in the heyday of the african american novel Americans in the World War II era bought the novels of African American writers in unprecedented numbers. But the names on the books lining shelves and filling barracks trunks were not the now-familiar Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but Frank Yerby, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, and J. Saunders Redding. In this book, Stephanie Brown recovers the work of these innovative novelists, overturning conventional wisdom about the writers of the period and the trajectory of African American literary history. She also questions the assumptions about the relations between race and genre that have obscured the importance of these once-influential creators. Wright"s Native Son (1940) is typically considered to have inaugurated an era of social realism in African American literature. And Ellison"s Invisible Man (1952) has been cast as both a high mark of American modernism and the only worthy...