- His parents, William and Florence Attaway,
both professional people, a doctor and teacher, re-
spectively, relocated to Chicago in 1916. There At-
taway began writing, later attending the University
of Illinois, where he graduated in 1936.
Attaway’s earliest forays into imaginative lit-
erature included plays written for his sister Ruth’s
theater group and the draft of a novel that was re-
fused by his college dean in lieu of the prescribed
academic work. Later, Attaway had a play, Carnival
(1935), produced at the University of Illinois, and
his short story “The Tale of the Blackamoor” ap-
peared in DOROTHY WEST’s Challenge in 1936.
Attaway is best known for his two novels, Let
Me Breathe Thunder (1939) and Blood on the Forge
(1941). Both reflect the proletariat concerns of
the period, but neither work achieved much pub-
lic success. The most striking feature of Let Me
Breathe Thunder is that its central characters, Step
and Ed, are white. They are rootless men in search
of their dreams and no doubt the kinds of men At-
taway encountered during his days as a hobo while
on hiatus from college during the early 1930s. The
novel is narrated by Ed who picks up their story
as they are leaving New Mexico en route to Seattle
with a young Mexican boy, Hi Boy, who adopts
Step and Ed as his guardians. Much of the narra-
tive concerns the experiences of the rootless as they
seek to establish some permanence in their lives.
Theirs is a harsh world of like-minded men who
live precariously from day to day, working hard,
living hard, and often dying hard without ever re-
alizing their dreams. In the case of Step and Ed, the
harshness of their lives is, over time, tempered by
their care of and concern for Hi Boy, whom they
eventually lose to a tragic death.
Let Me Breathe Thunder bears a striking re-
semblance in subject matter and tone to one of
its contemporaries, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
Additionally, the novel was no doubt informed
by Attaway’s own experiences on the road as well
as his involvement in the Federal Writers Project.
However, Attaway brings to bear on the novel’s
situation a dual perspective of rootlessness—hav-
ing been black and a hobo—that lifts the novel
well above the derivative or simply a tract of the
period.
Blood on the Forge, Attaway’s second novel, in
many ways furthers the author’s interest in the
restlessness of the human spirit. Moreover, the
novel is indeed protest fiction, but protest fiction
that is artistically rendered. Here race is a prime
factor: The three brothers, Big Mat, Chinatown,
and Melody Moss, are doubly victimized by their
race and class. In the novel, Attaway focuses on the
more negative aspects of the sharecrop system in
the South and the equally damning aspects of life
in the North on the other side of the Great Migra-
tion. The brothers’ physical and spiritual destruc-
tion at the hands of freedom shows the novel’s
strong kinship to RICHARD WRIGHT’s NATIVE SON,
which clearly both influenced and overshadowed
Blood on the Forge. Still, Blood on the Forge is an
important portrayal of the effects of rootlessness
on African Americans who cast their lots with life
in the so-called “promised land” of the North;
again, Attaway’s dual perspective on rootlessness
informs the work significantly.
Because neither novel sold well, Attaway aban-
doned novel writing in favor of writing musical
compositions and scripts for various media, in-
cluding “One Hundred Years of Laughter,” a 1966
television special on black humor. An additional
short story, “Death of a Rag Doll,” appeared in
1947, and shortly before his death in 1986 Att-
away had completed work on the script for “The
Atlanta Child Murders.” Regardless of genre, Att-
away’s work is that of a perfectionist. In general,
his narratives are unencumbered by subplots, and
he demonstrates a high level of sophistication in
weaving together protest and symbolic imagery.
Also, Attaway’s importance as a chronicler of the
Great Migration should not go unnoted. As one of
the several black writers who dealt with that aspect
of African-American life, Attaway stands out for
his sophisticated handling of literary naturalism
through his black characters.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carson, Warren J. “Four Black American Novelists,
1935–1941.” Master’s thesis, Atlanta University,
1975.
Klotman, Phyllis R. “An Examination of Whiteness on
Blood on the Forge.” CLAJ 16 (1974): 101–109.
Attaway, William 19
