screenplays. Frequently writing on topics pertain-
ing to the African-American experience, Bradley
has been a consistent contributor to The New
Yo r k e r, the New York Times Magazine, the Los
Angeles Times, Esquire, the Philadelphia Inquirer
Magazine, and The Village Voice. In addition to his
PEN/Faulkner, Bradley has been awarded a Gug-
genheim Fellowship for fiction and a National
Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for
nonfiction; he was a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest
Visiting Writer Fellow.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blake, Susan L., and James A. Miller. “The Business of
Writing: An Interview with David Bradley.” Cal-
laloo (Spring–Summer 1984): 19–39.
Ensslen, Klaus. “Fictionalizing History: David Brad-
ley’s The Chaneysville Incident.” Callaloo (Spring
1988): 280–296.
Janet Bland
Braithwaite, William Stanley Beaumont
(1878–1962)
Boston-born William Braithwaite, whose parents,
Emma DeWolfe and William Smith Braithwaite,
were West Indians, was best known as an editor,
critic, and anthologist. Left practically destitute
at age 12 by the death of his father, having pre-
viously grown up in a fairly prosperous home
where he was tutored in French, Braithwaite, who
was forced to seek employment to help meet the
daily needs of the family, was self-educated for
the most part, although he later received honor-
ary degrees from Atlanta University and Talladega
College and held a chair as professor of creative
literature at Atlanta University. Braithwaite’s in-
telligence, brilliance, and scholarly productivity
placed him among peers W. E. B. DUBOIS and
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, although not necessarily
in the vanguard with such pioneering turn-of-the
century black writers as PAU L LAURENCE DUNBAR
and even CHARLES CHESNUTT, who, at first, dis-
tanced himself from his black identity in order
to publish. Preceding the younger generation of
HARLEM RENAISSANCE writers such as LANGSTON
HUGHES, ZORA NEALE HURSTON, and WALLACE
THURMAN, who were, as Hughes notes in “The
Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” interested
in embracing and celebrating the complete spec-
trum of black identity and culture in their works,
Braithwaite did not wish to be viewed as a “Negro
poet”—a “race poet.” In fact, he encouraged the
younger poets of the Harlem Renaissance, spe-
cifically CLAUDE MCKAY, to submit for publication
only works that did not signal their racial iden-
tity. Braithwaite, whom Robert Bone identified,
along with DuBois, as a member of the conserva-
tive black faction, accused Hughes and his peers,
with the exception of JEAN TOOMER, the author of
Cane, of “glorifying the lowest strata of Negro life,
pandering to sensationalism, and succumbing to
the influence of white Bohemia” (95).
Becoming familiar with British lyricist poets
while working in a printing shop, Braithwaite
began to value and to write poetry in that tra-
dition, bemoaning the legitimatization of the
minstrel’s mask and voice, black dialect, imposed
on Dunbar, Johnson, and Chesnutt. Braithwaite
became editor of the New Poetry Review and a
regular contributor to such mainstream journals
as the Forum, Century, Scribner’s, and Atlantic
Monthly. He was, for many years, the leading book
reviewer for the Boston Transcript. His most sig-
nificant literary contributions, however, were his
annual Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook
of American Poetry, published from 1913–1929,
which included not only poems focused on such
traditional themes as truth and beauty but also his
critical literary analyses and reviews. He published
the work of many American modernist poets, in-
cluding Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg, before
they became well known.
His personal work includes three volumes of
poetry: Lyrics of Life and Love (1904), The House
of Falling Leaves (1908), Sandy Star (1926), and
Selected Poems (1948). In addition, he wrote his
autobiography, The House under Arcturus (1940),
and a biography of the Brontes, The Bewitched
Parsonage (1950). His celebration of Keats’s birth-
day, “October XXIX, 1795” (1908), is exemplary ofBraithwaite, William Stanley Beaumont 71