on Dixon’s own parents, who migrated from the
South before Dixon’s birth. Dixon’s second novel,
Vanishing Rooms (1991), places a love story at the
center of urban violence in a New York City bor-
ough. Both novels have a contemporary feel, and
Dixon’s skill at infusing history into his novels is
masterful. His novels illuminate the connection of
the present to the past.
Dixon also delved into the world of critical
study and published Ride Out the Wilderness: Ge-
ography and Identity in Afro-American Literature
(1987), which explored African-American lit-
erature. Marcellus Blount of the Southern Review
writes that Dixon takes us into the places of refuge,
those conquered spaces and imagined havens that
mark the African-American voyage from slavery
to freedom; and still he lingers along the way to
reinterpret several writers in this newly revised
canon. Dixon revisits the work of such notable
writers as FREDERICK DOUGLASS, HARRIET JACOBS,
JEAN TOOMER, RALPH ELLISON, and AMIRI BARAKA
(LeRoi Jones), to name a few, and connects their
shared experiences.
Dixon’s work examines life in its most intricate
form. To him, his sexuality was not static. It was
an aspect of his constantly evolving identity as an
African-American male. As in the work of JAMES
BALDWIN, Dixon’s incarnation as various symbols
within his work illuminates his ultimate need to
explore what it means to be an African-American
male who also happens to be gay. By the time of his
death, Dixon had already created a body of work
that represented his passion for life and thirst for
knowledge. And much like the late Joseph Beam,
Dixon, in his life and work, frames a time in Afri-
can-American literature that will be discussed for
many years.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Morrow, Bruce, and Charles H. Rowell, eds. Shade:
An Anthology of Fiction by Gay Men of African De-
scent. New York: Avon, 1996.
Nelson, Emanuel S. Contemporary African American
Novelists. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publish-
ing Group, 1999.
Paul W. Rodgers IIIDodson, Owen Vincent (1914–1983)
Although born too late to become a meaningful
voice during the HARLEM RENAISSANCE and over-
shadowed by the popularity of RICHARD WRIGHT’s
fiction, Brooklyn-born Dodson succeeded in win-
ning the attention of major critics, who compared
him as poet to Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg.
This secured a place for Dodson within the Af-
rican-American literary tradition, if not in the
mainstream literary tradition. With a B.A. from
Bates College and an M.F.A. in playwriting from
Yale School of Drama, Dodson became a well-
known dramatist and director, primarily at his-
torically black colleges and universities, while
achieving distinction as a novelist and poet. For
most of his professional career, he was associated
with the drama department at Howard University.
Dodson took the Howard University Players on a
successful tour, sponsored by the State Depart-
ment, of Scandinavia and Germany in 1949. DAR-
WIN T. TURNER credits Dodson with “contributing
significantly in Negro college theatre, a little-
known but important training ground for black
playwrights and performers” (95).
Dodson gained attention with the production
of his first and best-known play, Divine Comedy,
based on the life of African-American prophet,
spiritual and social leader, and founder during the
Great Depression of “heavens” or peace missions,
Father Divine (George Baker). In an interview with
John O’Brien, Dodson said his play, which received
a Maxwell Anderson Verse Play award in 1938, was
received with “raptures of pleasure” (59). Divine
Comedy and Dodson’s Garden of Time, a drama
about Medea, were produced at Yale University
during the 1930s. Several of his plays and operas
were later produced at the Kennedy Center. Dod-
son’s first novel, Boy at the Window (1951), about a
boy growing up, as he had done, in Brooklyn in the
1920s who must come to grips with the death of
his mother, was republished as When Trees Green.
He won a Paris Review prize for “The Summer
Fire”; the Review also included it among its best
short stories (1961).
Scholars and critics agree that Powerful Long
Ladder (1946), the first of Dodson’s three pub-
lished collections of poems, represents his bestDodson, Owen Vincent 143