William Attaway’s literary reputation rests upon two novels—Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939) and Blood on the Forge (1941)—that establish him as an exceedingly important black fictive voice of his generation. Most notably, his depiction in Blood on the Forge of the tragic physical and spiritual toll taken by the Northern industrial mills on black laborers from the South remains one of the most vivid and compelling dramatizations of the underside of the Great Migration in U.S. literature. In addition, even though he never published another novel in the wake of this magnificent accomplishment, Attaway did not, in fact, give up creative writing; rather, he embarked upon a long and fruitful career in television, music, and film. Neither of his novels is set in Chicago and he spent relatively little of his adulthood in that city. Nonetheless, it is crucial to understand Attaway as very much a product of the rich creative outpouring termed the “Black Chicago Renaissance” and to attend to the ways in which his fiction reflects the literary and ideological impulses informing the work of other African American artists identified with Chicago of the 1930s and 1940s.
Born in Greenville, Mississippi, on November 19, 1911, William Alexander Attaway was raised in a family of no mean distinction. His father, William A. Attaway, was a physician, an entrepreneur, and a leader in the region’s black community. After earning his medical degree at Meharry in 1902 and setting up a successful practice, Dr. Attaway launched a number of business initiatives that gained him considerable notoriety. In 1906 he assumed the presidency of a black savings bank not far from Indianola, Mississippi. Then, two years later, he headed the formation of a firm that eventually became the Mississippi Life Insurance Company, the first such venture owned and operated by African Americans.
In an article in the Daily Worker in 1939, Attaway comments on the motivation behind his family’s move from Mississippi to Chicago: “My father … had a notion that Negro kids brought up in the South unconsciously accept the whites’ estimate of them, and they never get to know what it is to be a human among humans. He brought us north hoping we wouldn’t absorb these false Southern ideas.”1 Although that explanation is no doubt accurate, there are also indications that Dr. Attaway had occasionally run afoul of powerful white interests in Mississippi because of both his commercial ambitions and his political views. Accordingly, his decision to leave the South may well have been driven by a range of concerns, some more pressing than others. Regardless, probably around 1918, Attaway’s father relocated the family to Chicago, where he built a new medical practice and his wife, Florence Perry Attaway, took a position as a school teacher.2 In short order, the Attaways established themselves as important members of the local black elite. Just how quickly Dr. Attaway rose to a position of prominence was apparent during the racial unrest in the city in July of 1919. As reported in the Chicago Daily Tribune, he was one of a handful of “representative business and professional men” who issued a public statement urging African Americans “to be the first to cease all acts of violence,” even if provoked by white attacks. He articulated his views on the matter this way: “Our policy ought to be to do everything we can to stop the rioting, and not depend upon reprisals and violence to right any wrongs.”3 Moreover, in the early 1920s he was a member of the Chicago Business League and a group called “the Mississippi club,” the purpose of which was to unify and advance the community of African American transplants from that state. On her own part, Mrs. Attaway was also a significant figure in black Chicago, serving around this time as an officer of a settlement organization in the city. Even the two Attaway daughters, Florence and Ruth, received notice in the Chicago Defender for their social activities.
Attaway’s parents were as ambitious in the goals that they set for their three children as they were in their own lives, and they hoped that their son would enter a profession that might solidify a place for him in the black bourgeoisie. Attaway, however, was pulled in other directions. On the one hand, he was fascinated with machines, and he attended Tilden Tech High School in Chicago with the goal of becoming a mechanic. Particularly captivated by airplanes, he remembered paying visits to a nearby airfield, where he performed odd jobs in exchange for free flights. On the other hand, Attaway developed a lasting interest in literature after encountering the poetry of Langston Hughes in school. His sister Ruth, an aspiring actress, encouraged his early attempts at creative expression, and he wrote a number of plays for her drama group.
Known for its trade curriculum under the guidance of Principal Albert Evans, Tilden Tech was racially integrated, and its black students helped to solidify the school’s reputation as an athletic power. Indeed, one of the most celebrated Tilden alumni from that period was the African American sprinter Ralph Metcalfe, who starred in the 1932 and 1936 Olympics and who later became a successful Chicago politician. It also may well have been at Tilden Tech that Attaway developed into a skilled tennis player; by the fall of 1930 he was competing in local tournaments, and he continued to do so for several years. Despite the prominence of blacks in the student body, however, Tilden was hardly free of racial tension. For instance, in 1929 the Chicago Defender published an article protesting its plans to hold a whites-only junior prom.
In the wake of his father’s sudden death in the late summer of 1929, Attaway reportedly dropped out of school and “spent much time hoboing to the exasperation of his mother.”4 After returning to Chicago, he graduated from Tilden in January of 1932, and one month later he followed in the footsteps of his two older sisters and entered the University of Illinois. From the outset, his conflicted goals had a deleterious impact on his academic performance, with his growing investment in creative writing proving a particularly serious distraction. Attaway recalled that he “spent the mornings sleeping through anatomy classes and the nights writing stories and one-act plays” and that he changed his major to pre-law because those courses were in the afternoon.5 In May of 1933, he also participated as an actor in a dramatic production on campus headed by his sister Ruth. Attaway later observed that all of this extracurricular activity “led to trouble with the dean, who was unimpressed when I exhibited a sociological novel as a substitute for prescribed work. In disgust I left college.”6 Other possible factors here may have been the lingering, destabilizing impact of his father’s passing and an urge to rebel against the strictures of his middle-class upbringing.
By the end of the spring semester of 1933, Attaway had turned his back on school; and at some point that year, he embarked on a wandering journey across the United States. After gambling away what funds he had in Kansas City, he made his way to San Francisco, where he worked as a stevedore and as a hand aboard cargo ships. Attaway traveled as an agricultural laborer through the West and Midwest as well, once riding a railroad car into Mexico, where, as Milton Meltzer puts it wryly in the June 26, 1939, Daily Worker, “his college Spanish failed him.” Attaway claimed that he had written a book while on a farm near Topeka, Kansas, during this period and that he had even gone to New York City in an attempt to find a publisher. Unsuccessful, he subsequently resumed “hoboing” and ended up on the West Coast, where he lived with a Japanese American family for several months.7 Finally, Attaway returned home to Chicago, nearly freezing to death in a freight car en route. After roughly a year and a half away from college, Attaway reenrolled at the University of Illinois for the fall semester of 1934. Wasting little time completing his degree requirements, he graduated in June 1936 with a BA in pre-law.
During this second stint in college, Attaway continued his creative work, most notably producing “Carnival,” described in the Chicago Defender as a “Negro one-act folk” play.8 The piece was staged on campus on January 25, 1936, by Cenacle, a black theater group in which Attaway participated as both a writer and an actor. In addition, his short sketch entitled “Tale of the Blackamoor” appeared in the June 1936 issue of Challenge magazine. A scant three pages in length, the story is a dreamlike fable that focuses on a black boy’s longing for the attentions of the “proud duchess” whom he serves. By the end of the tale, the youngster has projected his romantic urges onto a “Dresden china doll” that magically comes to life in his imagination.9 Although there is little in the piece that stylistically foreshadows Attaway’s more mature fiction, one can identify a number of themes that do, in fact, emerge in his later writing: first, the power of music; second, the connection between social hierarchy and race; and third, the use of fantasy as a way to transcend emotional distress. Ultimately, however, “Tale of the Blackamoor” is revealing as much for where it was published as for its actual content. Founded in March 1934 and edited by Dorothy West, Challenge provided a crucial forum for both established and aspiring African American authors, including Langston Hughes, Owen Dodson, and Arna Bontemps. And although its editorial posture was not as explicitly Marxist as that of New Challenge (its later incarnation, for which Richard Wright served as associate editor), Challenge was nonetheless radical in its ideological orientation.
Another important factor in the shaping of Attaway’s career during this phase was his relationship with Richard Wright, whom he recalled initially encountering when he heard him deliver an address on labor issues. Attaway subsequently arranged for Wright to speak before a campus literary group. On that occasion, Wright presented a draft of “Big Boy Leaves Home” and, as Attaway later observed, he ended up alienating virtually all of his listeners: “He started to read that swell story … and when he got to the second paragraph, half the audience had fled. Dick went on, set on giving it to them, and at the end, the room was empty of the literary set and only Dick and I were there.”10 Over the course of these interactions, Attaway befriended Wright, and the two Mississippi natives kept in touch at least into the 1940s.
One also cannot underestimate the impact of Chicago itself on Attaway’s life at the time. In the 1930s, the city was an extraordinarily vibrant and energetic site of artistic and political activity, and both Attaway and his sister Ruth were part of it. For instance, the famed African American dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham considered Ruth Attaway and her brother to be among her closest Chicago friends in the 1930s. Moreover, Attaway was one of several black authors who gathered at the South Side (George Cleveland Hall) branch of the Chicago Public Library that had opened in 1932, and he may have had been involved as well in the South Side Writers Group, which Richard Wright helped to form in May 1936. Whether Attaway was actually a member of that organization is unclear however, and the majority of researchers who have published on the South Side Writers Group do not list him as such.
Indeed, there appears to be a degree of uncertainty regarding Attaway’s activities more generally during these years. For example, a number of scholars state that he worked on the Illinois Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), offering dates ranging from late 1935 through 1936. Michel Fabre posits that Richard Wright and Attaway may have interacted, or even possibly first met, in the Chicago office of the FWP. (Wright had been appointed to the Illinois FWP in 1935, and he remained employed on it until his transfer to the New York City unit in the late spring of 1937.) Yet Attaway himself does not mention the FWP in his autobiographical comments in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Furthermore, although he was quite familiar with Attaway’s fiction, Arna Bontemps does not include him in his article on “Famous WPA Authors” in the June 1950 issue of Negro Digest. Finally, in a letter to the head of the Illinois Federal Writers’ Project in September 1937, Sterling Brown, the FWP’s Editor on Negro Affairs, identifies Attaway as someone who might be tapped for the Project, which suggests that the young, aspiring writer had not been formally involved to that point. Attaway’s participation in the Illinois FWP may have been unofficial, and he certainly was close to individuals whose service with that unit has been documented—Richard Wright and Katherine Dunham, to name but two. However, his college transcript indicates that he was enrolled at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana from the fall semester of 1934 through the spring semester of 1936 (including the summer session of 1935), which would likely have limited the time he could spend in Chicago primarily to breaks in the academic year and weekends.
Similarly, questions persist about whether Attaway, like Richard Wright, joined the Communist Party in the 1930s. Drawing upon interviews with Attaway’s black activist contemporaries, Alan M. Wald contends in Exiles from a Future Time that he “was a committed Communist from the late 1930s well into the Cold War era.”11 Other scholars simply note his radical Left affiliations. What is, at the very least, undeniable is that, as William J. Maxwell puts it, Attaway and many of his fellow Chicago black authors “wrote or edited or apprenticed within the Old Left’s literary networks.”12 Particularly after the Communist Party’s launching of its Popular Front phase in 1935, it actually would have been unusual for an ambitious, politically progressive black writer like Attaway not to have turned for his closest associations to artists on the Left, some of whom were Party members and some of whom were not.
With his college degree in hand, Attaway planned to move to New York City, where his sister Ruth was establishing herself as an actress; he reported spending the summer of 1936 working in a mint field to make money for the trip. Once in New York, he held a range of jobs, including stints as a labor organizer in Harlem and as a clerk in a dress shop. In 1936 Ruth Attaway joined the cast of You Can’t Take It with You, a Pulitzer Prize–winning Broadway comedy by Moss Hart and George Kaufman that opened in December of that year. A road company was being assembled, and Attaway’s sister convinced him to audition. He later commented, “I never wanted to be an actor … I was so scared reading those lines they all thought I was very funny. I got the part.”13 Attaway’s self-deprecating remarks do scant justice to the real accomplishment that his being hired represented. Indeed, the man for whom he was employed as understudy, James Carl “Hamtree” Harrington, was a relatively well-known vaudeville, musical theater, and film veteran. The production in which Attaway participated met considerable success, especially in Chicago, his hometown, where it had a record-breaking run from early February 1937 through mid-January 1938. In the midst of the demands of the touring schedule, he found time to continue his writing, and he recalled completing Let Me Breathe Thunder in three and a half months while in Philadelphia. He submitted the manuscript to the publishers Doubleday, Doran and Company and was with the play in Texas when he learned that his novel had been accepted.
Released in June of 1939, Let Me Breathe Thunder focuses on Ed and Step, two white migrants traveling through the American West looking for work during the Depression. Told from Ed’s point of view, the narrative traces the men’s experiences, first, with Hi Boy, a young Mexican whom they encounter in New Mexico and take with them to Washington; and then with a landowner named Sampson, whose daughter, Anna, impulsively enters into an ill-fated romantic relationship with Step. Appropriately, the text opens with Ed, Step, and Hi Boy riding a freight car; and for a large portion of the book, the main characters are in transit—either by train, on foot, or by automobile. This motif of men in motion lends the social world that Attaway creates a powerful sense of instability that aptly represents the lives led by Ed and Step. And Step’s habit of carrying a set of keys that are useless to him signifies the fact that while his and Ed’s easy mobility constitutes a sort of freedom, the cost is the absence of home, of domestic connection. The bonds that matter the most in Let Me Breathe Thunder are clearly male-centered, and they are marked by an often ruthlessly enforced emotional self-suppression that shields the two young men and their fellow wanderers from their own vulnerability. This passage in which Ed describes traveling in a cold boxcar with Step and Hi Boy reveals the code of behavior that he and Step endorse: “The kid moved up against me. His body was hot against my side. It would have been better for all of us to have snuggled together in a heap, but Step and me were funny about things like that. We were always so anxious to prove to each other how much we could stand. So he sat apart, and I was glad it was too dark for him to see me enjoying the heat of the kid’s body.”14 While understandable, this restraint can find expression, Attaway indicates, as callousness that, in turn, can lead to casualties—most notably, Anna, whom Step takes advantage of sexually and then abandons, and Hi Boy, who ultimately dies from a hand injury that he inflicts on himself in an attempt to demonstrate his toughness to Step, whom he idolizes.
For much of Let Me Breathe Thunder, the plot mimics the wayward nature of Step and Ed’s journey, with the narrative constructed of a series of nearly freestanding set pieces. Among the most effective are a conversation among a group of migrants riding a freight train and a moving depiction of the confusion and embarrassment that Ed and Step feel in a railroad dining car on the sole occasion in the novel when they can actually afford to pay for their passage. Once they and Hi Boy arrive at the Sampson farm, however, the pace and structuring of the book change as new interpersonal bonds begin to develop between Step and Anna and between Anna’s father and Hi Boy. The social network afforded the two men during this period also encompasses a black prostitute-turned-property-owner named Mag and her former pimp, Cooper. Although issues of race certainly arise, Attaway seems to be implying via Step and Mag’s warm friendship that the color line can be more porous the lower one descends in class, a point made explicitly by the one black man in the aforementioned freight-car conversation (“Guys on the road ain’t got prejudice like other folks,” he contends15). The peaceful, near idyllic life on the Sampson farm is finally violated by the trouble that follows in Step’s wake. Unwilling to accede to Step’s imminent departure, Anna arranges a tryst at Mag’s house, where she gets caught up in a violent conflict involving the pitifully insecure Cooper and a fiercely jealous Mag. Not only is Anna seriously hurt but local whites take Mag into custody in a scene that ominously resembles the early stages of a lynching. Although Ed and Step appear to escape this tragic turn of events unscathed, their return to the familiar life on the rails does not bring comfort, as they have to watch helplessly while Hi Boy slowly and excruciatingly dies from the infection that has spread from his hand wound. At the end of the novel, the two men are virtually where they were at the outset, disconnected from everything and everyone but each other, and still unable to express their pain, their neediness, and, now, their deep sense of loss.
One of the book’s real strengths is the direct simplicity with which Attaway limns his multiethnic cast of characters, for while Ed and Step are white, he includes several significant African American and Mexican American figures. Another is the power with which, like other proletarian fiction of that era, Let Me Breathe Thunder highlights the quotidian reality and importance of labor as well as the psychic cost entailed when people are unmoored from stable, meaningful jobs. Yet Attaway is careful to maintain his distance from the understated drama that his narrative unfolds. There is undeniable tragedy in the failed relationship between Step and Anna and especially in the fate awaiting Hi Boy, who embodies innocence in a world corrupted both by harsh economic realities and by the inevitable failings of human nature. However, Attaway renders no easy moral judgments in the text, and he strives to preclude the reader’s doing so as well.
A number of contemporaneous reviewers voice reservations about Let Me Breathe Thunder. The most negative dismiss it as imitative, linking Attaway’s approach to that of John Steinbeck in Of Mice and Men (1937). Others identify the stylized language and an indulgence in sentimentality as flaws, and one blames what he sees as weaknesses on Attaway’s having previously been a writer for the stage. In contrast, some critics note with approval both the force and realism of his dialogue and also the skill with which Attaway, a black author, brings to life his white protagonists. In the New York Post, May Cameron lauds his prose this way: “The novel is tightly, economically and cleanly written”; and Alain Locke highlights “the strong naturalness of [Attaway’s] characterization.”16 The most thorough review was that by Ulysses Lee in the journal Opportunity. Lee pays considerable attention to the black figures in Let Me Breathe Thunder, describing them as “among the best-realized characters in the book.” Moreover, he argues, “Attaway’s race proves itself of distinct advantage” in that his experiences as an African American afforded him insights into the alienation and hardship suffered by Ed and Step.17 Lee closes with this optimistic prediction about Attaway: “When he turns to a novel primarily of Negro life, he should produce one which will do much for Negro literature.”18 Other reviewers likewise anticipated a bright future for the young writer.
Despite the mostly favorable reception met by Let Me Breathe Thunder upon its release in 1939, the book has elicited relatively scant notice since then. Ralph Ellison gives it a reservedly complimentary mention in “Recent Negro Fiction” in the August 5, 1941, issue of New Masses; and in Negro Voices in American Fiction (1948), Hugh Gloster touches briefly upon it (but, oddly, not Blood on the Forge). More typical is G. Lewis Chandler’s neglecting of Attaway entirely in his 1948 overview of African American novels in Phylon. In 1952, Lion Books reissued Let Me Breathe Thunder in a pulp paperback edition called Tough Kid (with a second printing in 1956). However, it was not until Robert A. Bone’s The Negro Novel in America (1958; revised edition, 1965) that Attaway’s work finally began to undergo close scrutiny. Starting in the late 1960s, there has been an increase in scholarship on Attaway’s writing, but the bulk of it has centered on Blood on the Forge. One factor here may be the tacit critical consensus that of his two novels, Attaway’s second constitutes the richer artistic achievement. Another is the extent to which much of the fiction by African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s that focuses on whites—or at least on figures not clearly identifiable as black—has been overlooked by scholars. (Other examples include Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door [1947], Ann Petry’s Country Place [1947], Chester Himes’s Cast the First Stone [1952], Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday [1954], and most of the books by the prolific Frank Yerby.)19
The sense that Let Me Breathe Thunder manifested but the initial flowering of Attaway’s considerable creative promise was shared by the administrators of the Rosenwald Fund. Founded by Julius Rosenwald, who had earned his fortune via mail order sales and his part-ownership of Sears, Roebuck and Company, the Fund supported a wide range of projects. Of crucial importance were the many fellowships given to African Americans between 1928 and 1948, with the largest cluster of such grants allocated in the fine arts. William Attaway received one of these awards in 1940, and it facilitated the completion of his second novel, Blood on the Forge, which appeared in August of 1941. By that time, Attaway had established himself as a notable figure on the African American cultural landscape in New York City. He was a part of a remarkable cohort of black artists, musicians, and authors (the “306 Group”) who met regularly at 306 West 141st Street in Harlem; and in 1940 he resided in an apartment building at 33 West 125th Street along with, among others, Jacob Lawrence, Claude McKay, and Romare Bearden.20 The news of his forthcoming novel was significant enough for Arna Bontemps to write the following to his close friend Langston Hughes on August 19, 1941: “See where Attaway and Dick [Richard Wright] both have books coming up, entitled ‘Blood on the Forge’ and ‘12 Million Black Voices Speak’ respectively. Looks like this will be a heavy fall for our crowd.”21
Coincidentally, both of the works mentioned by Bontemps focus on the phenomenon termed the “Great Migration.” (Jacob Lawrence’s celebrated sequence of paintings called Migration Series appeared in 1941 as well.) From early in the twentieth century, commentators like R. R. Wright Jr., W. E. B. DuBois, Ray Stannard Baker, Herbert W. Horwill, George E. Haynes, and Carter G. Woodson had noted the remarkable “Negro Exodus” from the rural South to the urban and industrialized sections of the North and Midwest. There were many forces driving this unprecedented movement of African Americans—among them, crop failures, the restrictions on European immigration during World War I, ongoing Jim Crow practices and other forms of racial oppression in the South, and appeals disseminated both by Northern companies (often via labor agents sent into Southern communities) and by such black publications as the Chicago Defender. By 1920, the burgeoning African American population in the North had become concentrated in several manufacturing areas, one of which was Pittsburgh and its environs in western Pennsylvania. It is in this locale that William Attaway sets his powerful narrative about three black half-brothers who escape a degrading existence in rural Kentucky only to find themselves in the mind- and body-numbing hell of a mill town where steel is valued more than human life. Incorporating into his plot the dramatic steelworkers’ strike that took place in the region in 1919, Attaway examines the complex effects of the Black Migration in the context of the labor conflicts that marked the postwar period in the United States.
Blood on the Forge is organized into five sections. The first focuses on the Moss family—Mat, Melody, Chinatown, and Mat’s wife, Hattie—who are struggling to survive on a barren, worn-out farm in the spring of 1919. In Part 2 (the shortest in the novel), the three men flee the South in a freight car after Mat strikes a white overseer who had insulted their mother. Part 3 opens with the brothers’ arrival in the Allegheny County steel town and describes their sense of dislocation in the face of not just a new material and economic reality, but also a confusing multiethnic community where little of the Southern Jim-Crow racial protocol to which they are accustomed applies. Attaway reinforces the assaultive character of this world by highlighting the horrific sounds and sights of the factory: “The shaping mills were far down the river, but he could hear the awful screams when the saws bit into the hot metal. The blast was a million bees in a drum. The open hearth was full of agony. The daylight was orange yellow with the droning flames of the Bessemers.”22 Over the course of the final three sections of the novel, we see the brothers attempt to adapt to their brutal, dehumanizing new environment, only to fail in a tragedy that transcends the fate of any single individual or even that of the Moss family as Attaway levels a broad sociopolitical critique that indicts the values infusing a system so wasteful of life.
Attaway dramatizes the failure of the Moss brothers in terms not just psychic but also corporeal. Indeed, the physical loss that each man suffers literalizes the effects of the unnatural forces unleashed in the corporate drive to produce steel: Chinatown, who gains pleasure from the sensory surface of things, loses his eyes; Melody, who has coped with hardship though the art of his guitar-playing, smashes his hand; and Big Mat, who has heretofore overcome the trials of his life through his sheer brute strength and masculine vigor, is killed by a white striker while Mat is misguidedly acting as an enforcer for the mill owners. However, the Moss brothers are not the only characters who are damaged in this vicious, unyielding world. By rendering disturbing images of adolescent incest and of dismemberment and bodily deterioration, Attaway effectively conveys the extent to which the steel mill and the corrupting interests it represents consume and undermine the humanity of many of the workers and their families.
Particularly noteworthy among the victims in the novel are the women, who often resort to marketing their bodies in the desperate attempt to survive in a social order that commodifies nearly everyone in the community and that too frequently accords females value primarily in sexual terms. At one point, it appears that a young Mexican woman named Anna might free herself from her life as a prostitute when she and Mat move in together, establishing the rudimentary beginnings of what could conceivably evolve into a stable domestic home space. Unfortunately, Mat’s insecurity and violence and Anna’s obsession with the superficial trappings of class status ensure that their relationship will disintegrate. When Mat finally confronts Anna over her infidelity, she assails him with the insult “black peon.”23 In retaliation, Mat beats her unmercifully in a scene that both echoes his explosive rage upon his mother’s death that Attaway describes early in the novel and also foreshadows his brutal attack on the striking workers toward the end.
Just before he dies, Mat is groping toward an awareness of his true relationship to the exploitative economic powers that have manipulated and ultimately destroyed him, but the harshness of the fictive vision in Blood on the Forge remains unrelieved by any dramatic shift in consciousness on the part of the main characters. When seeking a counter to the book’s sobering pessimism, one should rather look first at the simple fact that in the final pages Melody and Chinatown are alive and on a train leaving the mill town. Second, Attaway does present members of the European immigrant community who have found ways to build coherent family structures. (That the black male migrants in the novel have come North without women and children may explain the absence of a corresponding African American community here.) Third, while Attaway keeps his authorial intrusions to a minimum, the ideological thrust of the book toward a qualified endorsement of the labor strike is evident, even as he shows how racism can leave many blacks alienated from both the management of the mill and the predominantly white union.
The reviews of Blood on the Forge were even more favorable than those earned by Let Me Breathe Thunder. In particular, the majority of the critics emphasize the persuasive evocation of the inhuman conditions in the steel factory and of the toxic life in the mill town. The verisimilitude to which commentators allude apparently derived from personal experience. In 1980 Attaway recalled that he “spent 1 ½ years as a steelworker—at the Republic plant in South Chicago, at U.S. Steel in Youngstown, Ohio, and at other mills in Pittsburgh and Gary.”24 Although it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when in his life he held these jobs, the firsthand knowledge that he tapped in producing Blood on the Forge contributed to the convincing nature of the narrative, and many saw the novel as marking the fulfillment of the potential manifested in Let Me Breathe Thunder. Typical of such praise is that of Drake de Kay in the New York Times Book Review: “Written by a Negro author with notable objectivity, this is a starkly realistic story involving social criticism as searching as any to be found in contemporary literature.”25 George Schuyler lauded the book as “thoughtful, penetrating, brilliant” and he placed Attaway in the front rank of contemporaneous black authors: “With the exception of Arna Bontemps, no Negro novelist has made his characters come so alive and painted his background with such authenticity.”26 Where several observers felt Let Me Breathe Thunder to be derivative of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, some now linked Blood on the Forge with Richard Wright’s best-selling Native Son, which had appeared the previous year. For instance, George Sanford describes Blood on the Forge as “reminiscent of Wright because the book is fraught with frustration and suffering.”27 However, if the unprecedented success of Native Son overshadowed Attaway’s new novel, Doubleday, Doran and Company took full advantage of Wright’s notoriety by including his imprimatur in an advertisement for Blood on the Forge in the September 9, 1941, issue of the New York Times. In his comments, Wright urges, “If there are people who are baffled by the conduct of the Negroes, then they should read this novel, and they will be better people for having done so, for it will add unto them a new and better knowledge of the processes of American civilization. The reality that Attaway depicts is not beautiful, but it is nonetheless moving and human for that.”28 Similarly impressed with Attaway’s achievement, Sterling Brown, Arthur Davis, and Ulysses Lee included an excerpt from the book in their groundbreaking anthology, The Negro Caravan (1941).
The strong support for Blood on the Forge expressed by Richard Wright, a well-known Communist author, indicates the extent to which Attaway was perceived as an important radical political voice at the time. Not surprisingly, his novel garnered its most detailed evaluations from reviewers influenced by leftist ideological perspectives. In the December 1941 Crisis magazine, James W. Ivy describes the book as effectively engaging “the eternal problem of capital and labor and race as we find it everywhere in industrial America.”29 However, both Ivy and James O. Hobson (in the November 1941 Opportunity) judge the portrayal of the Moss brothers to be limited. In the November 8, 1941, issue of the Communist Party’s Daily Worker, Ralph Warner contends that although Attaway dramatizes the oppression of African American laborers, he does not display their ability to come to self-awareness regarding the complexity of their situation and to discern the route to liberation through the “final unity of black and white workers.” Warner emphasizes the fact that “there is no Mr. Max [Bigger Thomas’s Communist lawyer in Native Son] to evaluate the social significance of Big Mat’s plight.”30 This omission, Warner contends, makes it all the more imperative that Attaway develop his proletarian characters further. The single most elaborate and lengthy review of Blood on the Forge was by Ralph Ellison, writing in the spring 1942 Negro Quarterly, a journal edited by Angelo Herndon. Fully sharing Warner’s sense that Attaway fails to deliver the ideological payoff that the novel so compellingly sets up, Ellison opines, “There is no center of consciousness, lodged in a character or characters, capable of comprehending the sequence of events.” He further complains that “Attaway grasped the destruction of the folk, but missed its rebirth on a higher level.”31 Ultimately, Ellison can appreciate the skill with which Attaway sketches the painful dilemma confronting black workers like Mat and his brothers. However, what he had clearly hoped to see and did not is Attaway’s commitment to demonstrating how Mat’s “motivation, the intense desire to live and maintain a sense of dignity, has also produced the most conscious American Negro type, the black trade unionist.”32 Attaway’s willingness to engage such critiques from the progressive community in a public forum reflects the seriousness with which he took them. In December 1941, a few months after the release of Blood on the Forge, Attaway was featured in the “Evenings with Negro Authors” series at the New York Public Library branch in Harlem. The Chicago Defender quotes a portion of Attaway’s defense of his novel at the event: “I’m not interested in writing about those Negroes who succeed…. I’m looking for the major trend of the masses, not the talented tenth.” His respondents at the event were “Dr. Samuel Sillen of New York University, Editor Roy Wilkins of The Crisis and short story writer Ralph Ellison of the League of American Writers.”33
Although Carl Milton Hughes treats Attaway’s second book briefly in The Negro Novelist in 1953, the first in-depth scholarly examination of Blood on the Forge was Robert A. Bone’s close reading in The Negro Novel in America (1958; revised edition, 1965). A major shift in the treatment of Attaway generally and of Blood on the Forge in particular was then ushered in by Edward Margolies’s chapter on the writer in Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors (1968) and by the release of two new editions of Blood on the Forge: a hardback reprint by Chatham Bookseller in 1969 and a paperback by Collier-Macmillan in May 1970 with an introduction by Margolies. (In 1953 Blood on the Forge had been issued as a inexpensive paperback by Popular Library in a run of 300,000; as in the case of Tough Kid, the cover art of this pulp edition was designed to highlight and exploit the sexual relationship in the narrative.)
The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed the rediscovery of a whole raft of African American texts, and it is hardly surprising to come across several scholarly analyses of Blood on the Forge during this period. One of the most striking is that by the black cultural nationalist Addison Gayle Jr. in The Way of the New World (1975). Although Gayle acknowledges Attaway as “the most important of the novelists to view the black problem in Marxist terminology,” like some earlier reviewers he finds the characterization of Mat to be deeply flawed.34 However, in contrast to Ellison, who argues that Attaway fails to dramatize the Communist ideal of interracial class struggle, Gayle contends that Attaway’s hewing to a Marxist line is itself the problem insofar as it precludes his accepting Mat “as the black outsider become rebel.”35 In the wake of Gayle’s evaluation, one encounters in the 1980s useful treatments of Attaway and his fiction by such scholars as Jane Campbell, Bonnie J. Barthold, Lawrence Rodgers, Bernard Bell, and Samuel B. Garren, to name a few.
Another shift in the critical commentary on Attaway dates roughly from the paperback reprint of Blood on the Forge issued in 1987 by Monthly Review Press with an introduction by novelist John Oliver Killens and an afterword by Richard Yarborough. The 1970 Collier edition had fallen out of print, and the novel’s rerelease by Monthly Review, a leftist publisher, brought the book to the attention of a new generation of readers while situating Attaway firmly within a radical literary tradition.36 The burgeoning body of research over the past two decades on the impact of Left politics on African American authors has proven beneficial in the case of William Attaway, because it has led to a more detailed and nuanced sense not just of his career and writings but also of the historical context in which he worked and the ideological strains that shaped his fictive vision. Especially noteworthy in this regard is the scholarship on black artists and the Left by Alan M. Wald, Barbara Foley, Timothy R. Libretti, William J. Maxwell, Gerald Horne, Bill V. Mullen, James Edward Smethurst, and Mary Helen Washington. As the 1950s Red Scare—with its public pillorying of Communists, former Communists, and alleged Communists—recedes further into the past, these and other scholars will, no doubt, shed new light on the complex ways in which American radicalism influenced black writers, thereby enhancing our appreciation of Attaway’s contribution.
The entry of the United States into World War II led to Attaway’s enlisting in July 1942 in the military, where he served until the end of the conflict. In the October–November 1944 issue of the periodical Negro Story, the editors observe, “In spite of the fact that WILLIAM ATTAWAY is in the army now, he is writing continually, and we should soon be hearing from this fine young author who, like [Charles W.] Chesnutt, is a writer first and then a Negro.”37 If Attaway was, in fact, writing during this time, little of what he produced appears to have survived. Indeed, in October 1947 a new journal entitled The Tiger’s Eye carried a short story of his that may have been the last fiction that he published. Included in an issue with pieces by Thomas Merton, Owen Dodson, Marianne Moore, and Anaïs Nin, “Death of a Rag Doll” recalls Attaway’s “Tale of the Blackamoor” (as well as sections of Jean Toomer’s Cane and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio) far more than it does either of his two novels, which are grounded firmly in the conventions of proletarian realism. As in “Tale of the Blackamoor,” Attaway here adopts a suggestive, almost dreamlike tone in his depiction of the psychological bond between a woman named Mina Smith and her half-brother, Cal, whose mental disabilities and peculiar appearance cause some in the community to dub him “that witless boy at the Smith farm.”38 To Mina, however, Cal is “like my rag doll after the rain,” and Attaway poignantly examines the strain on the siblings’ relationship brought on by Mina’s impending wedding as she ultimately decides to turn her back on her doting half-brother to enter what appears to be a loveless marriage. Although Attaway describes Mina as “the dark child of the wife’s first husband,” there is no explicit invoking of race or racial conflict in the story, and it is unclear whether this piece indicates a direction in which Attaway might have gone had he continued to produce fiction.39 One can also only speculate regarding the possibility that Attaway’s impressionistic tracing of a troubled family tie in “Death of a Rag Doll” might speak in a veiled way to his own relationship with his sister Ruth (who had, by that point, married the prominent writer and editor Allan Morrison). What is certain is that this story signaled the close of the initial major phase of his writing career. A number of factors could explain why he chose to turn away from fiction. First, there were the negative judgments of Blood on the Forge rendered by some of his peers on the Left. Second, his books were, at best, modest successes in terms of sales, and Attaway was to find other, more lucrative creative outlets. Finally, he was evidently sensitive to the high expectations spawned by his two novels, and the burden of meeting those expectations may have proven too daunting and discouraging to overcome. Regardless of the reasons for the shift, Attaway’s next major artistic accomplishments were in the arenas of music, television, and film.
After the war, William Attaway struck up a close friendship with the talented singer Harry Belafonte, who had taken acting classes with Attaway’s sister Ruth. Both men were involved in progressive political circles in New York, and both men shared a great interest in music as well. In December 1950 Attaway and an acquaintance named Ferman Phillips opened the Sage, a restaurant in Greenwich Village. Belafonte joined them in what turned out to be a fascinating but financially unrewarding venture that cemented the connection between Attaway and Belafonte. According to Arnold Shaw, author of Belafonte: An Unauthorized Biography, the restaurant was patronized by “indigent Village-ites, jazz musicians, dope addicts, theater people, alcoholics, folk singers, and hoods.”40 In spite of the tribulations that managing the Sage entailed, the place served as an energizing creative environment, and Attaway remembered “working out arrangements” for folk songs with Belafonte and others after hours at the establishment.41 By the late summer of 1951, the friends had sold the restaurant; however, the musical collaboration that took seed there would bear considerable fruit.
In the early 1950s, Harry Belafonte’s artistic career began its rapid, upward trajectory. He became a fixture as a singer on the club scene in New York City, and he cut his first recordings for RCA Victor in the spring of 1952. He made his film debut in 1953 in Bright Road, and that same year he won a Tony Award for his role in the Broadway play John Murray Anderson’s Almanac. Then, in 1954 he starred with Dorothy Dandridge in the movie Carmen Jones. As Belafonte’s celebrity grew, William Attaway accompanied him on his travels around the country. Attaway saw this relationship as not just professional but personal, and he later mentioned his awareness of the sense of isolation that his good friend experienced on the road. Attaway recalled that he once had his sister Florence meet Belafonte upon his arrival in Chicago “just so that he would not feel he was coming alone into a strange city.”42
By the mid-1950s, Attaway’s own career was again on the rise. However, he was now making his mark as a writer for television, a medium then still in its infancy. One especially notable TV project on which both he and Belafonte worked was “Winner by Decision,” an episode of The General Electric Theater series. Broadcast by CBS in late 1955 and based on a teleplay by Attaway, this show featured Harry Belafonte in his first dramatic TV role and the well-known African American singer and actress Ethel Waters. Attaway appreciated how the two stars delivered his lines; but because of “this effort on the part of both principals to outdo one another, the show ran long” and his scripting credit never made it to the screen.43
Around this time, Attaway and Belafonte also collaborated on a stage musical entitled Sing, Man, Sing, a production fueled by the latter’s powerful engagement with The Family of Man, a celebrated photographic exhibition curated by Edward Steichen in 1955 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art that resulted in a best-selling book of the same title. The relatively disappointing response to Sing, Man, Sing, which premiered in April 1956, paled in comparison to the stunning success of Belafonte’s appearance only months earlier in the October 2, 1955, episode of NBC’s The Colgate Comedy Hour. A staff writer at the network, Attaway had been assigned to help prepare the segment featuring Belafonte, and the initial plan had been to focus it on the black folk hero John Henry. However, the two decided on a Caribbean music theme instead, and they brought on board the singer-songwriter Irving Burgie, who performed under the name “Lord Burgess.” Although Burgie appears to have been partly responsible for alerting Belafonte and Attaway to the potential appeal of calypso, it is crucial to stress that they both had long been interested in black folk material and that Belafonte had previously sung and recorded Caribbean music. The three men developed several pieces for the television program, among them the now well-known “Banana Boat Song” (or “Day-O”); and the Belafonte segment, entitled “Holiday in Trinidad,” was “a smash,” as Burgie put it in 1996.44 They soon thereafter went into the studio to produce an entire album, and Attaway was involved throughout the process, including providing liner notes for the record. Released by RCA Victor in the fall of 1956 and featuring such numbers as “Jamaica Farewell” and “Banana Boat Song,” Calypso brought Harry Belafonte unprecedented global popularity as a singer and was the first long-playing album in the United States to sell a million copies. Moreover, it triggered what Time magazine dubbed “Calypsomania”—“the biggest thing in the pop-music business since rock ’n’ roll started rolling.”45
Astutely capitalizing on the fad, Attaway published Calypso Song Book: Authentic Folk Music of the Caribbean in November 1957. A large-format volume aimed at young readers, it contains tablature for twenty-five songs along with an introductory discussion of the history of calypso. Although brief and simply written, this essay manifests a conception of black culture that represents a telling strain in Attaway’s thought. Highlighting the roots of calypso in Africa, he contends that the music is dramatic proof of the power and durability of the artistic practices that Africans brought with them across the Atlantic. In addition, Attaway links calypso to strategies of resistance developed by the slaves as mechanisms for both psychic nurturance and practical subversion in the face of racist attempts to dehumanize them. This reading of African American folk cultural production as a complex response to oppressive conditions informs Attaway’s treatment of the blues in Blood on the Forge. It also belies any superficial reading of calypso generally, and it complicates considerably one’s sense of the ideological impulses driving Attaway and Belafonte’s remarkable musical project.
Although his involvement in Belafonte’s appearance on The Colgate Comedy Hour in 1955 constituted a landmark in Attaway’s postwar career, it was hardly an isolated case. According to Arnold Shaw in 1960, Attaway had generated “more than 400 TV scripts” by that point.46 One of his most important subsequent achievements in the medium was the episode of ABC Stage 67 entitled “A Time for Laughter: A Look at Negro Humor in America” and broadcast on April 6, 1967. Produced by Harry Belafonte and written by Attaway, this program featured an extraordinary collection of black actors and comedians, including Redd Foxx, George Kirby, Moms Mabley, Richard Pryor, Pigmeat Markham, Sidney Poitier, Dick Gregory, Diana Sands, Godfrey Cambridge, and Diahann Carroll. Indeed, “A Time for Laughter” probably represented the first opportunity for many non-black Americans to see some of these performers, and the show earned a 1966–67 Emmy Award nomination in the category of “Outstanding Variety Special.”
In 1967 William Attaway published Hear American Singing, his final book and his second on music. With an introduction by Harry Belafonte, this volume is an ambitious, if compact, historical overview of folk music in the United States. As was his goal with Calypso, Attaway is clearly trying to reach a mass, most likely youth audience; and as was the case with that earlier text, his engagement with folk culture is shaped by his refusal to take either a narrowly aesthetic or an ethnographic approach to the topic. The fact that the volume is bookended by an opening chapter on American Indians and two closing chapters on, respectively, African American music and contemporaneous popular music suggests both the range of Attaway’s interests as well as his attempt to decenter white bourgeois culture in the narrative that he constructs. If the multicultural assumptions undergirding this text might seem familiar to twenty-first-century readers, Attaway’s organizational strategy was certainly ahead of its time in 1967.
Throughout the fifties, sixties, and seventies, Attaway also wrote steadily for film, often on an uncredited basis. In 1957 Attaway was said to have been penning the script for an all-black version of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, to be directed by Robert Rossen.47 This project, along with a proposed movie adaptation of Let Me Breathe Thunder, apparently never came to fruition. However, Attaway’s relationship with Rossen reportedly led to his working on the script for the award-winning film The Hustler (1961) even though his contributions ultimately received no public acknowledgment. Shortly after the release of Hear America Singing, Attaway became involved in what potentially could have been two of the most significant movie projects of his career. Published in September 1964 by the bestselling author Irving Wallace, The Man is a speculative novel about an African American senator who unexpectedly becomes president of the United States. Although the controversial book, like most of Wallace’s fiction, was exceedingly popular, major studios were wary of investing in a film version for fear of alienating Southern theater-owners. By 1968, however, plans for a cinematic adaptation were in place, and Attaway took on the job of writing the screenplay. Samuel B. Garren notes that Attaway submitted two drafts in 1968 and 1969, making major changes in the portrayal of blacks in the text. Wallace himself met with Attaway in Los Angeles and was impressed with his insights and his intense commitment to the story. Nonetheless, the studios ultimately paid Attaway for his work and dropped him from the movie, supposedly because of dissatisfaction with his scripts. The Man was completed without his further participation and released in mid-1972 to a decidedly lackluster reception. That same year, Attaway was tapped by the actor Anthony Quinn to produce the screenplay for a possible film about Henri Christophe, the Haitian revolutionary leader. In the wake of heated protests by black actors when Quinn, a Mexican American, indicated that he planned to play Christophe himself, this project was aborted.
Attaway’s personal life underwent major changes during the sixties. In 1962 he married longtime friend Frances Settele in a ceremony in Harry Belafonte’s house. In 1964 their son, William, was born; their daughter, Noelle, followed two years later. Then in 1966 he and his family traveled to the Caribbean for what was to have been a short vacation; they ended up remaining there for about a decade, mostly in Barbados. Until that point, Attaway had been active in the Civil Rights movement, taking part, for instance, in the famous march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, that Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. led in March 1965. However, for a range of professional and personal reasons, Attaway may well have needed distance from the American scene. A few observers suggest that he found Barbados especially appealing since it offered him the opportunity to live in a country run by blacks.
After returning to the United States (where he resided in Berkeley before moving to Los Angeles), he was hired to write for a new dramatic series on NBC entitled Skag, which ran for a handful of episodes in early 1980 before its cancellation. Soon thereafter, Attaway joined the production team of Grambling’s White Tiger, a made-for-TV movie featuring the Olympic decathlon champion Bruce Jenner in the role of a quarterback recruited as the first white player on the football team at Grambling, a historically black college. Broadcast by NBC on October 4, 1981, Grambling’s White Tiger also marked a professional reunion of Attaway and Harry Belafonte, who was cast to play Eddie Robinson, Grambling’s celebrated coach. Attaway’s final project was another television movie, The Atlanta Child Murders. Helmed by Abby Mann (with whom Attaway had collaborated on Skag), this docudrama focused on the serial killings of black children and young adults that had drawn extensive national attention in the early 1980s. Before he could complete the assignment, however, Attaway was stricken with cancer, and he died in Los Angeles on June 17, 1986.
In evaluating the literary accomplishments of William Attaway, one might reasonably argue that he was the victim of bad timing. Most notably, Blood on the Forge appeared but a year after Richard Wright’s Native Son, a text that cast a dense shadow over virtually every novel published by an African American in its immediate wake. Furthermore, World War II interrupted Attaway’s career soon after the release of his second book, and then the 1950s saw a shift in readers’ tastes away from proletarian fiction, a mode in which he had made a name. Later, at the peak of new scholarly and popular interest in African American literature in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Attaway was living outside the United States. By the time he returned, mainstream America had begun to turn in a conservative ideological direction, and the white fascination with black literature had subsided. All that said, any characterization of Attaway’s artistic career as one thwarted by lost opportunities and unfulfilled potential is, in fact, inaccurate. Although different circumstances may conceivably have encouraged him to continue to produce fiction, it is undeniable that he remained a strikingly resourceful and deeply political writer throughout his adult life. If, on the one hand, he merits no little recognition for his complex, innovative engagement with issues of labor, power, race, and masculinity in Let Me Breathe Thunder and the exceptional Blood on the Forge, he may, on the other hand, ultimately deserve even more accolades as a pathbreaking creative force in film and television in a period when there were few black voices to be heard in those predominantly white media. When viewed as a whole, Attaway’s artistic life was distinguished by real and sustained achievement in a remarkably diverse set of venues.
My research benefited immeasurably from the staffs at the Chicago Historical Society, the University of Illinois Library, the Newberry Library, the National Archives, the University of California-Berkeley Library, the Carter G. Woodson branch of the Chicago Public Library, the Chicago Public Schools alumni website, and the Young Research Library of the University of California-Los Angeles. I also want to thank Mary Helen Washington and Alan Wald for their valuable input and the following individuals for their diligence as research assistants: Neetu Khanna, Aneeka Henderson, Denise Cruz, Rychetta Watkins, and Mary Lou Fulton. Finally, I must express my special gratitude to Mrs. Frances Attaway and to her children, William Attaway and Noelle Attaway Kirton.
1. Meltzer, Milton. “William Attaway, Negro Novelist,” Daily Worker, June 26, 1939, 7.
2. Attaway recalled that he was five when his family moved, which would have placed their arrival in Chicago between November 1916 and November 1917 (see Meltzer, “Attaway,” 7). However, there are reports of his father’s involvement in Mississippi politics through early 1918. In July 1918, the Chicago Defender notes that Dr. Attaway was now residing in the city.
3. “‘End Riots Ere It’s Too Late,’ Negroes Advise,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 31, 1919, 3.
4. Burley, Dan. Review of Let Me Breathe Thunder, by William Attaway, New York Amsterdam News, August 12, 1939, 6.
5. “Autobiographical Note,” Illinois Alumni Newsletter (December 1939) (clipping identified and dated by hand), J. Kerker Quinn Papers, record series 15/7/30, box 20, University of Illinois Library; Meltzer, “Attaway,” 7.
6. “Autobiographical Note.”
7. Meltzer, “Attaway,” 7.
8. “Illinois State News,” Chicago Defender, February 1, 1936, 21, National edition.
9. Attaway, William A. “Tale of the Blackamoor.” Challenge, 1 (June 1936): 3.
10. Meltzer, “Attaway,” 7. Meltzer’s article specifies neither the college where Attaway first heard Richard Wright speak nor the location of Wright’s reading. In his biography of Wright, Michel Fabre observes, “The Daily Worker reported that the only exception [to the positive responses to “Big Boy Leaves Home”] had been the Literary Society at the University of Chicago where, as he was reading the manuscript, he saw the audience gradually leave the room, apparently shocked by his language.” In a footnote, Fabre adds, “In an early version of Black Boy … [Wright] says this took place in Evanston, where he had been invited to read his works and talk, and that the Communists who denounced him as a Trotskyite at the time spread the word that the audience had to leave because Wright was speaking without their permission. Wright found himself alone with William Attaway, who took him to a party among black people where they had a wonderful time” (Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright [New York: William Morrow, 1973], 133, 547–48). It may well be that Attaway witnessed this incident during one of his trips home to Chicago. If so, he may have somehow been involved with the literary society at the University of Chicago since Meltzer credits him with inviting Wright to address the group.
11. Wald, Alan M. Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2002, 281. Wald continues, “At the height of the Cold War he hid and transported Black Communist Party leaders who went underground” (Wald, Exiles, 283).
12. Maxwell, William J. New Negro, Old Left. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, 2.
13. Meltzer, “Attaway,” 7.
14. Attaway, William. Let Me Breathe Thunder. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1939, 50–51.
15. Attaway, Thunder, 57.
16. Cameron, May. “New Negro Writer Makes His Bow,” review of Let Me Breathe Thunder, by William Attaway, New York Post, June 29, 1939, 15; Alain Locke, “Dry Fields and Green Pastures.” Opportunity 18 (January 1940): 8.
17. Lee, Ulysses. “On the Road.” Opportunity 17 (September 1939): 283.
18. Lee, “On the Road,” 284.
19. See Gene Andrew Jarrett, Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
20. The illustration on the original dust jacket for Blood on the Forge was produced by African American artist Charles Alston, one of the leaders of the “306 Group.”
21. Arna Bontemps to Langston Hughes, August 19, 1941, Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters, 1925–1967, edited by Charles H. Nichols. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980, 87. Bontemps also commented on Attaway’s novel in a radio program entitled Of Men and Books (“To Interview Arna Bontemps on Radio,” Chicago Defender, November 15, 1941, 12, National edition).
22. Attaway, William. Blood on the Forge. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1941, 67.
23. Attaway, Blood, 262.
24. Deeb, Gary. “‘Skag,’ A Real Ground-Breaker May Bring TV into the 1980s,” Chicago Tribune, January 24, 1980, A8. Romare Bearden spent some of his youth in Pittsburgh with his maternal grandmother, who had black laborers from the South lodging with her. In the December 1937 issue of Opportunity, Bearden published an article about the role of such workers in the struggle to unionize the remaining mills in the Midwest after the CIO’s victory in its dealings with the massive U. S. Steel (Romare Bearden, “The Negro in ‘Little Steel,’” Opportunity 15 [December 1937]: 362–65, 380). Attaway and Bearden were close in the late 1930s—in the summer of 1939, for instance, Attaway took his friend along on a trip to visit his mother in Michigan. Bearden’s knowledge of the steel industry and interest in the union movement likely provided considerable reinforcement for Attaway’s current project. It may even be the case that Bearden supplied Attaway with information for Blood on the Forge to which the latter would not have otherwise had easy access. In 1968 Bearden acknowledged that Attaway had positively affected his own work as well by urging him to focus on “Southern themes” in his art. He recalled Attaway telling him, “Why don’t you draw—you know, just let yourself go and draw some of the things that you know about!” (Romare Bearden, interview by Henri Ghent, June 29, 1968, in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/bearde68.htm).
25. de Kay, Drake. “The Color Line,” review of Blood on the Forge, by William Attaway, New York Times Book Review, August 24, 1941, 18.
26. Schuyler, George S. “Kingdom of Steel,” review of Blood on the Forge, by William Attaway, Pittsburgh Courier, October 18, 1941, 15.
27. Sanford, George. Review of Blood on the Forge, by William Attaway, Chicago Defender, November 8, 1941, 9, National edition.
28. Advertisement for Blood on the Forge, by William Attaway, New York Times, September 9, 1941, 21. A second such ad appeared in the Chicago Defender but with a differently worded statement by Wright and a brief comment from Walter White (Advertisement for Blood on the Forge, by William Attaway, Chicago Defender, November 1, 1941, 2, National edition).
29. Ivy, James W. “Trouble in Canaan.” The Crisis 48 (December 1941): 395.
30. Warner, Ralph. “‘Blood on the Forge’ Is Story of Negro Brothers,” review of Blood on the Forge, by William Attaway, Daily Worker, November 8, 1941, 7.
31. Ellison, Ralph. “Transition.” Negro Quarterly 1 (Spring 1942), 90. Ellison’s review is a revision of his earlier piece on Attaway’s novel (see Ralph Ellison, “The Great Migration,” New Masses, December 2, 1941, 23–24).
32. Ellison, “Transition,” 91.
33. “‘Blood on the Forge’ Author Replies to Book’s Critics,” Chicago Defender, December 13, 1941, 9, National edition.
34. Gayle, Jr., Addison. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, N.J.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975, 159.
35. Gayle, Way of the New World, 163.
36. The Monthly Review edition is now out of print, as is that issued by Anchor-Doubleday in 1993 with an introduction by Nicholas Lemann. The novel is currently available on the New York Review of Books imprint (2005), with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney.
37. “Current Town Talk.” Negro Story 1 (October–November 1944), 60.
38. Attaway, William. “Death of a Rag Doll.” The Tiger’s Eye, 1 (October 1947): 87.
39. Attaway, “Rag Doll,” 86.
40. Shaw, Arnold. Belafonte: An Unauthorized Biography. Philadelphia: Chilton, 1960, 75. In a recent interview, Belafonte suggests that Sidney Poitier was also involved in the Sage (Misani, “A Talk with Harry Belafonte,” part 2, New York Amsterdam News, December 29, 2005–January 4, 2006, 17).
41. Shaw, Belafonte, 78.
42. Ibid., 118.
43. Ibid., 171.
44. Jay Orr, “Music City: Singer Greets Music City with Legendary Sound of ‘Jamaica Farewell,’” Nashville Banner, November 14, 1996, C3.
45. “Calypsomania,” Time, March 25, 1957, 55.
46. Shaw, Belafonte, 171.
47. An Academy Award winner for All the King’s Men in 1949, Rossen had been blacklisted after testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951; then, two years later, he agreed to provide the Committee with names of individuals with Communist Party affiliations.
Attaway, William. Blood on the Forge. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1941.
———. Calypso Song Book: Authentic Folk Music of the Caribbean, edited by Lyle Kenyon Engel. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957.
———. “Death of a Rag Doll.” The Tiger’s Eye 1 (October 1947): 86–89.
———. Hear American Singing. New York: Lion Press, 1967.
———. Let Me Breathe Thunder. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1939; London: Robert Hale, [1940].
———. “Tale of the Blackamoor.” Challenge 1 (June 1936): 3–4.
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Foley, Barbara. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993.
Garren, Samuel B. “‘He Had Passion’: William Attaway’s Screenplay Drafts of Irving Wallace’s The Man.” CLA Journal 37 (March 1994): 245–60.
———. “Playing the Wishing Game: Folkloric Elements in William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge.” CLA Journal 32 (September 1988): 10–22.
———. “William Attaway.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 76: Afro-American Writers, 1940–1955, edited by Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis, 3–7. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1988.
Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, N.J.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975.
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Margolies, Edward. Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1968.
Maxwell, William. New Negro, Old Left: African American Writing and Communism between the Wars. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Morgan, Stacy I. “Migration, Material Culture, and Identity in William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge and Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker.” College English 63 (July 2001): 712–40.
Rodgers, Lawrence R. Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1997.
Wald, Alan M. Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2002.
Various of Attaway’s page proofs, scripts, and correspondence can be found in collections at the University of California-Los Angeles Library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the University of Minnesota Library, and the University of California-Berkeley Library.