498 Making It New: 1900–19451937 after three years but, undeterred, West then began New Challenge. A co-editor
was Richard Wright, and Wright published here his influential “Blueprint for Negro
Writing” (1937), in which he declared his independence from bourgeois literary
forms. A Marxist conception of reality and society, he argued, offered “the maximum
degree of freedom in thought and feeling ... for the Negro writer.” West herself
became uneasy abut the association of New Challenge with a strict Communist Party
line. Nevertheless, under her editorship the magazine encouraged and published
pieces that explored the terrible conditions of the black working class. Many of West’s
own short stories were published in the New York Daily News. Her most notable
single achievement, however, was her novel, The Living is Easy (1948), a dramatic
investigation of the insularity, snobbery, and shallowness of the black bourgeoisie of
New England, whom West called the “genteel poor.” At the center of the story is a
powerful female character, Cleo Judson, an unscrupulous, scheming woman who
brings ruin on herself and those members of her family who allow themselves to fall
under her control. A strong black female character of a very different kind stands at
the center of Ann Petry’s most memorable work, The Street (1946), the first novel by
an African-American woman to sell more than a million copies. Lutie Johnson, as
she is called, fights desperately to make a decent living for herself and her son on the
mean streets of the inner city. She knows that her body is a spectacle to the men who
have economic power over her, that she is the object of male sexual desire and
exploitation. And, using a mixture of naturalism and dream, Petry shows Lutie
struggling with that knowledge – and the problem of being a woman as well as poor
and black. In other novels, Petry turned her attention to the hypocrisies of rural New
England (Country Place (1947)) and to the tragic relationship between a black man
and a white woman (The Narrows (1953)). But the driving concern of most of her
work was what she called a desire to show black people as “a sturdy, indestructible,
wonderful part of America, woven into its heart and into its soul.”
Margaret Walker had a career that extended from the last days of the Harlem
Renaissance in the 1930s to the Black Arts movement of the 1960s. Born in Alabama,
the daughter of a minister, Walker moved to Chicago, where she became a member
of the Works Progress Administration, studied at the University of Chicago, and
became a member of the Southside Writers Group led by Richard Wright. Walker
was later to end her friendship and collaboration with Wright, describing her reasons
for doing so in Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1986). Before that, however, they
enjoyed what Walker called a “rare and once-in-a-lifetime association.” Wright read
and advised Walker on her poetry. And, even after Wright moved to New York in the
1930s, Walker helped Wright with the research for his novel, Native Son, sending
him newspaper clippings about Robert Nixon, a young black man accused of rape in
Chicago who partly inspired Wright’s portrait of Bigger Thomas, the novel’s
protagonist. Even before Walker’s first book of poetry, For My People, was published
in 1942, she had won national attention for her work: the title poem, for example,
had been published in Chicago five years earlier. And with its publication her
reputation was secured. “For My People,” in particular, was acclaimed as a significant
piece for African-Americans. Deploying the long line of Whitman here, and theGGray_c04.indd 498ray_c 04 .indd 498 8 8/1/2011 7:54:05 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 05 AM