Whether depicting a young girl’s suicidal reaction to an unwanted pregnancy or a family’s desperate attempt to integrate a neighborhood, Frank London Brown writes about everyday folks and their revelatory encounters with crisis. His works show the sociological imprints that mark his predecessors, Nelson Algren and Richard Wright; however, Brown’s faith in black culture tempers his blunt portrayals of alienating industrialization and institutional racism. His is one of the most celebratory voices in the Chicago Renaissance. Where others stress the city’s ability to erode the individual’s will, Brown unearths the rituals that prepare a hurting soul for redemption. His writings never evade the difficulties of blackness or urbanity, yet using his intimate knowledge of Chicago’s musical and working-class landscapes, he multiplies the perspectives from which a reader may view a dilemma and reveals the durable life-ways and the resilient spirit that nourish the potential for triumph.
Brown achieves literary force through what Ruth Miller calls an “unvarnished atmosphere of immediacy.”1 Often treating circumstances that he has experienced firsthand, the writer transforms the crude poetry of survival into poignant testimony. Like James Baldwin, whose spiritual odyssey acts as a multivalent prism for his creative output, Brown confronts the anonymity and the camaraderie, the random treachery and the unexpected sustenance that emanates from urban experience. Facing this reality he emerges as a prophet of a secular gospel, embracing jazz, the blues, and affection as antidotes to the absurdity that threatens modern life. Brown’s command of vernacular speech convincingly evokes his characters’ sensibilities, and his shrewd social awareness compellingly creates the environment that they inhabit. Despite his regionalist tendencies, Brown scrutinizes Chicago’s cultural particularities as a vehicle for comprehending heroism, death, and love in broader African American life. He prizes the city because it vigorously sates his curiosity about the achievement of liberty amid unremitting coercion.
Brown, the eldest child of Myra Myrtle and Frank London Brown Sr., was born in Kansas City, Missouri, but in 1939, his family moved to Chicago, seeking relief from racial discrimination and financial difficulty. The Browns discovered a city filled with bittersweet possibilities. As a youngster, Frank attended Colman Elementary School. After Colman, he went to DuSable, Chicago’s first high school built for an African American population. DuSable High, named in 1935 to honor the black city father, John Baptiste Point DuSable, featured a high-quality musical program. Under the direction of Walter H. Dyett, this program included a concert band, a marching band, and a jazz band. Dyett also initiated an annual production, the Hi-Jinks show, which spotlighted the varied talents of the student body. Brown’s appreciation of jazz and the blues certainly benefited from these conspicuous resources in his formal education. He also imbibed from his DuSable peers a determination to pursue lofty ambitions. In an environment that nurtured Harold Washington, the first black mayor of Chicago, and renowned publisher William H. Johnson, Brown undoubtedly sensed the need to live meaningfully. He refined his views of that necessity through an unorthodox tutelage on the South Side streets.
If 1938 South Wabash Avenue, the address of DuSable High School, represents one pole of Brown’s adolescent enlightenment, then the Fifty-Eighth Street “Stroll” is the other. From Morrie’s Record Shop, where the teenager listened to Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Muddy Waters, and Joe Williams to the ubiquitous tenements that housed “a dark nether-world of crime,” addiction, and despair, the Stroll embodies the irreducible contradictions in black urban life.2 Sterling Stuckey asserts that Brown’s adventures along this “grinding, dehumanizing” thoroughfare form an “apprenticeship.”3 Introducing the inescapable simultaneity of beauty and ugliness, this environment exposes Brown to the disparate experiences that cohabitate the human spirit. Even in high school, he imagined writing might be a way to order these impressions. Sixteen-year-old Brown, in the spring of 1944, visited the offices of Johnson Publishing Company and requested a job as an editor. Since he had no qualifications other than his desire, the episode ended disappointingly; however, it showed Brown’s vague conviction that writing and publishing mattered. As he furthers his education, this conviction strengthens.
Brown graduated from DuSable in January 1945. Following a brief stint at Wilberforce University in Ohio, he joined the army in January 1946. While in the service, perhaps inspired by fond memories of the Hi-Jinks shows, he sang baritone in a group. His courtship of Evelyn Marie Jones, his high-school sweetheart, intensified, and on November 30, 1947, the two were married. Their union produced three daughters and a son who died a short time after birth. Taking advantage of the GI Bill, Brown registered at Roosevelt University in downtown Chicago. Opened in 1945 after a controversy over prejudicial admissions policies at the Central YMCA College, Roosevelt quickly became an attractive destination for what Dempsey J. Travis termed “education-hungry black veterans.”4 There, Brown discussed the plight of Chicago with future power players such as Gus Savage, who would serve in the United States Congress, and Harold Washington. Brown’s enthusiastic participation in debates and strategizing showed his commitment to social change and his investment in the city’s development. As his associations widened and his job history diversified, he concentrated his political energy on Civil Rights and labor issues.
While completing his undergraduate studies, Brown provided for his family with an intriguing array of jobs. Spending time as a machinist, a postal clerk, a loan interviewer, and a tavern owner, he not only developed an interest in the labor movement, but also honed the observational skills that prepared him to represent Chicago. After graduating from Roosevelt with a BA degree in 1951, Brown registered at Kent College of Law in Chicago. His interest in the law flagged, leading him to leave Kent in 1954, but during this same interval, his writing career gained momentum. Appearing at the Gate of Horn, a landmark music club, Brown became one of the first writers to read short stories to jazz accompaniment. He supplemented these experiments with work for the Chicago-Sun Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Defender. Later, he resumed his education, enrolling in a master’s program at the University of Chicago. Brown’s intellectual drive was formidable, and it is telling that throughout his studies, he worked continually. Wary of withdrawal from everyday realities, he sought positions and pursued research that ensconced him in common living. This commitment, along with his upbringing, made him prize the obscured struggles of hidden personalities, a disposition that influenced his creative writing.
Brown’s early publication, the short story “Night March” (1957), explores the obligations that an imminent lynching creates. Set in an unnamed Southern community, it functions somewhat like a parable. Geeter, a black man who got caught with his white mistress, is imprisoned in a henhouse awaiting the murderous retaliation of the town’s white men. Buster, the conflicted protagonist, alerts other black men to Geeter’s plight, but when the group, chafed by prior inaction, commits to violent intervention, he laments, “I didn’t think we was going to commit suicide. I just thought that we might get together and ask Mr. Gunison nice-like not to kill Geeter.”5 Dramatizing how racism impels ordinary black folks to epic decisions, Brown dwells on intraracial barriers to action. Buster’s proposal not only reflects bizarre reasoning, but also a troubling willingness to make someone else responsible for Geeter’s release. When the group commences its night march, going to rescue Geeter, they leave Buster behind “in [a] darkened room.”6 The story ends as Buster’s “whining broken cry”7 rises around the others, who walk “in single file.”8 Crisp dialogue propels this story, but its real strengths are delicate characterization and a spare, yet striking plot. The theme of noble confrontation that emerges here becomes a staple in Brown’s oeuvre.
In 1958, Down Beat magazine published “More Man Than Myth,” Brown’s profile of the iconoclastic jazz pianist, Thelonious Monk. A widely cited article, this piece, filled with sharp insights and impeccable scene-setting, foreshadows the writer’s bolder experiments with multivoiced, single-subject narration. Monk fascinates Brown, nevertheless, as the writer observes, “one interview or 10 cannot shatter the wall that Monk has built around himself.”9 To address this dilemma, Brown multiplies his views of his subject. Combining the perceptions of Nellie, Monk’s wife; Harry Colomby, his manager; Robby Barnes, a singer; and Baron Bennerson, a bartender with Monk’s own observations, the writer captures the pianist as a montage of uniquely illustrative impressions. This technique shows how the collaborative impulses of small-group jazz coexist with the fully realized individuation of the solo, and it unlocks for Brown a literary aesthetic that suits his portrayals of modern urban existence.
Chicago’s sociocultural reality saturates Brown’s imagination, but he rejects the idea that placing characters in the city insures their destruction. By studying bebop artists like Monk, the writer discovers that the interplay between context and individual potential need not be fatal. As Maryemma Graham argues, bebop, “an abstract extension of the historical forms of jazz,” acknowledges external forces like poverty, sickness, and oppression; however, instead of succumbing to them, the bebop artist internalizes these forces and uses them to form a mature self that resists “the victimization process.”10 Once Brown assimilates bebop’s conviction that heroic exertion can transform despair, he creates Chicagoans, who although harried, always have the option of pursing dignity.
Trumbull Park (1959), Brown’s first novel, explores the menace that prompts a black family to leave the slums and the hostility that envelops them as they move into a white housing project. Named after the residential development that Brown and his family lived in from 1954–57, this book, as Charles Tita has noted, engages “the national thrust toward racial integration”; nevertheless, its writer insists on telling a uniquely local story.11 References to landmarks like the Owl Theater and Club DeLisa situate readers in Chicago’s musical milieu, and elevated stops and streets evoke the city as a distinct physical space. Even the housing crisis at the center of this novel bespeaks the peculiar history of overcrowding, restrictive covenants, and racial diversity that make Chicago a midwestern industrial immigrant city. Brown embraces the simultaneously national and local significance of Trumbull Park because he sees in it an adjunct to the public and the personal quality of human duress. For him, literature should confront this complexity in life’s discordances, and his initial novel examines one family’s response to its own customized chaos.
At the beginning of Trumbull Park, Louis “Buggy” Martin, the novel’s protagonist and first person narrator, watches two-year-old Babydoll fall off a disintegrating porch and “hit the ground four stories down.”12 Capturing the absurd volatility that permeates his family’s present home, the dilapidated Gardener Building, Babydoll’s death becomes an immediate catalyst for the Martins’ relocation. If their old building contains rotting banisters, indomitable vermin, and premature death, their new apartment, in segregated Trumbull Park, quickly reveals an impressive set of perils. Incessant bombing, mobs chanting racist epithets, and an indifferent police force are everyday realities for Buggy and his wife, Helen, and their two daughters. Initially their reaction is grim endurance, but as they form closer relations with other black couples who live in the neighborhood, the Martins realize that planned collective action not only provides physical and psychological fortification, but also a more efficient path to liberty.
Much of Trumbull Park considers what a meaningful response to racial intimidation looks like, and at the center of its meditations are questions about black manhood similar to those asked by Richard Wright in Uncle Tom’s Children. When angry whites chase Buggy into his apartment, he tearfully says to Helen, “I should have stayed out there and fought … I should have stayed out there and died … What kind of man am I?”13 Although they do not face the same situations, each of the black men who live in the project confronts a similar quandary: what is masculinity when the safety, the sanity, and the dignity of my family are threatened? Buggy’s inclination to martyrdom appears noble, yet Brown tinges it with abdication. By juxtaposing Buggy’s musing with the image of his pregnant wife and his two children, the writer suggests that simple sacrifice will not resolve this crisis. Brown emphasizes marriage and parenthood as integral parts of the solidarity that grows between the black families, and in doing so he hints at the magnitude of the transformation that these folks must undertake. Their lot involves a willingness to face mortality, yet their deepest calling is preparing the world for their living.
Throughout Trumbull Park, police escorts humiliate the black families. When the men go to work, they must request a paddy wagon. If the women want to shop, visit their parents, or even give birth to their children, they must be transported via a police vehicle. Ostensibly this arrangement protects them from harm, but its chief effect is to reinforce the circumscribed quality of their existence. In the novel’s final chapter, Buggy refuses the ride from the police and stages a “walk-in.” He plans a solo entry, but Harry Harvey, the most recent arrival in Trumbull Park, joins him. Singing Joe Williams’s song, “Every Day,” the men walk through a brick-hurling, “nigger”-chanting mob not only signaling their discovery of a path to freedom, but also hinting at how Brown’s view of Chicago dialogues with those offered by Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks. Whereas the former, in Native Son, emblematizes the city through the ineffable terror of the tenements, the latter’s novel, Maud Martha, evokes the suffocating quality of kitchenette buildings even as it celebrates the quiet, private embrace of self. Brown’s presentation of the Gardener acknowledges that certain spaces swallow lives; nonetheless, his novel’s conclusion suggests a city whose unique beat enables a loud and public black identity, one that delivers entire communities instead of solitary souls.
According to Mary Helen Washington, Trumbull Park “sold more than 25,000 copies,”14 and Clarence Major remarked that “when the book came out the publisher actually promoted it.”15 Despite these facts and a string of positive reviews in the Chicago Sunday Tribune, the Christian Century, and the New York Times Book Review, Brown’s novel has received very little long-term notice. Washington discusses it as a “‘repressed’ text of the 1950s,”16 suggesting that Brown’s trade-union, left-of-center politics may have harmed the book’s reception. Whatever the reasons, any objective estimate must conclude that scholars, whether of regional or African American literature, have neglected Trumbull Park. Despite their indifference, in March of 2004, Eight Forty-Eight, an award-winning Chicago Public Radio program, included the novel on its “essential book list for anyone who wants to truly understand Chicago.”17 This honor demonstrates that, at least for some Chicagoans, the work still captures something essential.
Brown began working at Ebony in November 1958, and by March 1959, he realized his teenage ambition when he was promoted to associate editor. While with the magazine, he completed an interview with Mahalia Jackson entitled, “Mahalia the Great” (1959). He dwells, in this article, on the singer’s authenticity, stressing the sincerity of her Christianity. When he writes that “no sensitive man can escape the life cry in her song,”18 Brown, in part, supplies the celebratory overstatement that such profiles demand, but he also reveals a genuine appreciation for Jackson’s artistry. In her singing, he saw an unpretentious profundity and a conviction that he aspired to in his own work. Despite receiving recognition because of Trumbull Park, Brown did not slow his pursuit of other publications. He revisited the site of prior success, placing “A Cry Unheard” (1959) in Chicago Review. Getting into his first non-Chicago–based journal, he published “In the Shadow of a Dying Soldier” (1959) in the Southwest Review. When Robin Cuscaden and Arnold Kaye started Vigil at Brown’s alma mater, he contributed “Tuesday 10:31 am” (1959). These three short stories capture an oscillation between documentary realism and modernist experimentation that reveals an intriguing development in Brown’s literary aesthetic.
The Southern setting and combat undertones of “In the Shadow of a Dying Soldier” link it with “Night March,” as does its evocation of lynching. Still, where the latter dramatizes an abstract circumstance, the former explicitly represents the trial of Emmett Till’s murderers, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. Following Frank, a union program coordinator from Chicago, the story chronicles a reverse migration that starts in the Midwest and ends in Sumner, Mississippi. Initially, Frank’s first person narration evinces a journalistic precision, presenting characters, settings, and attitudes with certainty; however, the longer he stays in the South, the more he understands that “the facts were beginning to betray” his “well-thought-out generalizations.”19 At the trip’s start, Frank believes that the conviction of the accused men would constitute the sole terms of victory. When he departs Sumner, speeded by warnings from his landlady, he holds a different perspective. Frank, on his plane ride home, discovers that Milam and Bryant have been acquitted, and he becomes sick. Recovering from his disappointment, he realizes that notwithstanding the outcome of the trial, “something BIG had been won”20 even in black folks’ willingness to publicly name their wrongdoers.
In “A Cry Unheard” twenty-two-year-old Maggie, with her baby in her arms, jumps from a window. While her act reverberates through the text, this story, a rambling monologue, focuses on her brother’s response to the tragedy. His statements ostensibly express his inability to comprehend what his sister has done, yet they betray fear that his and his parents’ reaction to her out-of-wedlock pregnancy may have contributed to her death. Even as he insists that Maggie could have turned to her family, he remembers his mother’s embarrassment, his father’s anger and his own suggestion that she “put the baby in an orphanage.”21 Equally damning are his references to the letters that his sister wrote him, letters filled with pain that he did not answer. As the story ends, Maggie’s brother remarks, “She didn’t have to do it.” His sentiment partakes more of self-recrimination than external indictment.
“Tuesday 10:31 am” details the plight of Bob, “the only living being,”22 after an atomic bomb hits Chicago. Filled with stream of consciousness narration that intermittently shifts from third to first person, this story literalizes urban destruction, using the nuclear threat associated with the Cold War as a subtle, yet crucial, subtext. Bob, who floats on a “mattress in the uppermost room of the Pershing Hotel,” wonders about his family, his infidelity, the bomb shelters of the rich, and God, but ultimately he wants to die. Although his injuries and his entrapment insure eventual death, Bob, alternately praying and ranting, seeks to speed up the process. He tries to summon the will to roll off the mattress and drown; however, he balks at suicide, returning instead to ask God to end his life. Bob’s situation begs the question of how humans should comport themselves at the extremes of existence. Whereas Brown’s earlier work engages this theme via concrete dilemmas, here the writer creates a philosophical case study, a technique that recurs later in his career.
In 1960 Brown completed his master’s degree at the University of Chicago. As part of the requirements, he submitted a thesis that ultimately became his second novel, the posthumously published The Myth Maker (1969). Reminiscent of Richard Wright’s The Outsider (1953), this book explores death and the meaninglessness of life in the context of African American urban existence. Set in Chicago, it draws intensely on Brown’s familiarity with the city’s South Side. Ernest Day, the novel’s protagonist, abandons Phyllis his wife and Helen his daughter protesting that his “routine of morning noon and night” as a husband and a father destroys his “chances of ever knowing what life is all about.”23 Filling his rented room with books that comfort “him in his loneliness,”24 he seeks vast truths to ease his “great ache.”25 Ernest’s quest occasionally exhilarates him, but more often it inspires “dryness,”26 an agonizing frustration that fixates him on death. As The Myth Maker opens, he struggles with a dry episode.
Standing on Fifty-Eighth Street, the “Stroll,” Ernest watches as an old man “smelling like gin and talcum powder”27 walks past. When the man smiles at him, showing “even, yellow teeth,” the protagonist experiences an inscrutable rage, and after chasing him down an alley, he chokes him to death. Momentarily, this murder relieves Ernest’s dryness, but for the remainder of the novel, he struggles to determine the significance of his act. A junkie, who witnesses the murder, tries to blackmail Ernest, and Officer Blimp, a corrupt policeman, encourages Ernest to join his drug ring. These men suggest the vulnerability that the protagonist’s crime produces, but he gains the greatest insight into the murder’s meaning when he interacts with an informal group of racial strategists.
Initially Ernest’s bookishness alienates him, but when he is introduced to Willard, Gary, Richard, and Freda, he finds a group of black folks who also earnestly seek vast truths. This group lacks a consensus position; they represent ideologies as disparate as Communism, Black Nationalism, and capitalist pragmatism. Despite their heterogeneity, they remind Ernest that his need not be a solitary journey. In particular, he gravitates toward Willard because he sees in the young man a burgeoning dryness that resembles his own. During a car ride, Ernest confesses to Willard that he has killed a man. Willard, when he discovers that Ernest took a black man’s life, chides him for his misdirection. As he, Ernest and Richard are having a beer, Willard explains, “I don’t want to kill a man to be a bird in my own private sky. I’m going to kill a man to create a mass sentiment … a mass conception of the Negro by the Negro.”28 Ernest, by now, rejects Willard’s notion that violence can create a whole consciousness. He sees the moral equivocation that his own act occasions, and he senses that other avenues have been neglected.
Richard, a young black student, dates Rhea, a white coed, and at a crucial moment in the novel, she discovers that she is pregnant with his child. After overhearing Richard talk stridently about the inevitability of conflict between blacks and whites, Rhea decides to get an abortion. When complications arise following that procedure, Richard enlists Willard and Ernest to help him get her to a hospital. The couple’s tenderness as they work through the crisis reminds Ernest that love teaches seminal lessons about life. Discussing it with Willard, he relates that he left his family for “a great big, smoky dream of the wild blue yonder” only to discover “the dark place”29 of his ideal existence. He tries, in the final pages of The Myth Maker, to redeem what Richard and Rhea have taught him.
An unspoken bond immediately emerges when Ernest meets Freda, Willard’s sister, and he senses within her glances a question about when he would “make himself whole again with her body and her again whole in a new and perhaps this time sanctified way.”30 Their connection occurs very early in the novel, but they act upon it only in the book’s final chapter. After sharing all the misguided ways that they attempted to remind the world that “life [is] real,”31 the couple starts their lovemaking. Officer Blimp smashes Freda’s door, coming to hold Ernest responsible for the murder, yet he cannot penetrate the cocoon of Ernest’s enlightenment.
Shot through with references to Sophocles, Dante, and Virgil, The Myth Maker also alludes to Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane. Brown makes this conglomeration effective by embracing the philosophical without abandoning the concrete context of Chicago. This book presents politically engaged black characters who read voraciously, yet they occupy cultural spaces, like the Stroll, that daily emblematize the conundrums that they ponder. Thus, like Ernest, they continually retain the resources for correcting misperception.
In 1961 Brown unsuccessfully pressed Roosevelt University to hire Gwendolyn Brooks. Despite his failure, he did express his admiration for her in a Negro Digest article entitled “Chicago’s Great Lady of Poetry” (1961). At the University of Chicago, Brown worked toward his doctorate in political science. The Committee on Social Thought, under John U. Nef, honored him with a fellowship, and continuing his concern for labor issues, he directed the university’s Union Leadership Program. During the summer of 1961, Brown discovered that he had leukemia. Unlike the protagonist of “Tuesday 10:31 am,” he seemed to view imminent death as a call to more vigorous action. Sterling Stuckey remembers that Brown, late in 1961, decided “to pay his dues”32 by participating in a wade-in at Chicago’s Rainbow Beach and by taking part in a sit-in against discriminatory practices in University of Chicago–owned apartment buildings. These actions suggest that Brown never tired of pursuing justice; his final publications show a similar impulse.
“McDougal” (1961), a much anthologized work, is almost identical to “The Whole Truth” (1964). Building up to a trumpet solo from the story’s namesake, a “tall worried looking white man,”33 the text registers the impressions of his black bandmates as they shift from ridiculing McDougal’s appearance to acknowledging the emotion within his playing. Brown avers that circumstance rather than race informs righteous sound.
The South recurs as a setting in “A Matter of Time” (1962), a story that captures the last moments of Willie Lee, a laid-off mill hand. Certainly, the specter of his own demise influences Brown’s theme; nevertheless, even as he portrays his protagonist’s death, the writer frames it with a layoff, an indication of volatility in a laborer’s life. The supreme irony is that Willie Lee dies not while unloading a bale of cotton, but while listening to his children argue. The Monday after his funeral, “the plant called the men back to work.”34
On March 12, 1962, Brown died at the University of Illinois Educational Research Hospital. Gwendolyn Brooks read the poem “Frank London Brown: A Tenant of the World,” at his funeral, and many mourned his passing. In “An Unaccountable Happiness” (1962), an essay published less than a month after his death, Brown reinforces his belief that irreducible contradictions define human existence. He writes, “The fault is believing that the world can be park all the way through.”35 Chiding naiveté, Brown’s remark also implicitly endorses empathy. His two posthumously published short stories pick up this meditation on fellow feeling.
The Northern laborer takes center stage in “Singing Dinah’s Song” (1963), a first person account of technology and its enigmatic effect on the worker. While the narrator, an employee at Electronic Master, Incorporated, views his punch press as an ugly machine that “bangs and screams,”36 his buddy, Daddy-O, who sometimes stands amid the presses singing Dinah Washington songs, asserts, “That is my machine … Me and this machine is blood kin.”37 Daddy-O’s speech punctuates an episode in which he confronts a manager and is taken away by the police, but in the aftermath, the narrator realizes that he knows his punch press “better than … most live people.”
“The Ancient Book” (1964) contemplates the unpredictable shape of deliverance. Living in a condemned building, Maggie, the protagonist, wields her departed boyfriend’s .38 automatic to fend off rats that attack her sleeping baby. Driven into the snow-filled streets by the rodents’ boldness, she seeks shelter in a tavern. A man, claiming to be “the direct kin of an African chief” offers her a book, “from before the Bible,” that will change her life.38 Giving him her last dollar, Maggie discovers that the book was published in 1957. She falls asleep reading the book and a young girl slips a “hat-collected cluster of bills down her bosom.”39
Clarence Major, in The Dark and Feeling (1974), states that Frank London Brown “will remain a minor writer occupying a small place in the literary history of black Chicago.”40 Major’s assessment contains a disarming frankness; however, his judgment of Brown’s legacy is both prescient and myopic. Trumbull Park generates a season of notoriety for Brown, yet the following decades deliver virtual obscurity. In part his plight stems from the shortness of his life; however, his literary career reveals not only the politics of American publishing, but also the benefits and drawbacks of a man committed to a single locale. Brown devotes himself to Chicago, touching lives in literary, social, and political circles. This choice affords him unbounded good will within the city and makes him a significant figure in the Chicago Renaissance, but it cost him a broader reputation. In the end this trade-off probably would have satisfied him, and still the book on his worth is not closed. In October 1998, Brown was posthumously inducted into the National Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent. In 2005, Northeastern University Press published a scholarly edition of Trumbull Park, with a foreword by Mary Helen Washington. Thus, the man Gwendolyn Brooks called a “scrupulous pioneer”41 is still conquering new terrain.
1. Miller, Ruth. “Frank London Brown.” In Black American Literature 1760–Present, edited by Ruth Miller. Beverly Hills: Glencoe Press, 1971, 625.
2. Stuckey, Sterling. “Frank London Brown.” In Black Voices, edited by Abraham Chapman. New York: New American Library, 1968, 670.
3. Ibid., 670.
4. Travis, Dempsey J. An Autobiography of Black Chicago. Chicago: Urban Research Institute, 1981, 119.
5. Brown, Frank London. “Night March.” In Short Stories by Frank London Brown. Chicago: Frank London Brown Historical Association, 1965. This volume does not number its pages; thus, I have identified all quotations from it by indicating the page of the individual story on which it appears. This quotation is taken from the third page of “Night March.” All further references will follow this format.
6. Ibid., 4.
7. Ibid., 5.
8. Ibid., 4.
9. Brown, Frank London. “More Man than Myth.” Down Beat 25 (October 30, 1958): 16.
10. Graham, Maryemma. “Bearing Witness in Black Chicago: A View of Selected Fiction by Richard Wright, Frank London Brown, and Ronald Fair.” CLA Journal 33 (March 1990): 289.
11. Tita, Charles. “Frank London Brown,” In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990, 59.
12. Brown, Frank London. Trumbull Park. Chicago: Regnery, 1959, 1.
13. Ibid., 142.
14. Washington, Mary Helen. “Desegregating the 1950s: The Case of Frank London Brown.” The Japanese Journal of American Studies 10 (1999): 23.
15. Major, Clarence. The Dark and Feeling: Black American Writers and Their Work. New York: The Third Press, 1974, 102.
16. Washington, “Desegregating,” 16.
17. Chicago Public Radio, “A Chicago Birthday Book Bag,” http://www.wbez.org/programs/848/series_features/848_040304books.asp (11 July 2008).
18. Brown, Frank London. “Mahalia the Great.” Ebony 14 (March 1959): 74.
19. Brown. “In the Shadow of a Dying Soldier,” in Short Stories, 2.
20. Ibid., 16.
21. Brown, Frank London. “A Cry Unheard.” Chicago Review 13 (Autumn 1959): 120.
22. Brown, Frank London. “Tuesday 10:31 am.” Vigil 1 (Spring 1959): 6.
23. Brown, Frank London. The Myth Maker. Chicago: Path Press, 1969, 78.
24. Ibid., 23.
25. Ibid., 21.
26. Ibid., 12.
27. Ibid., 15.
28. Ibid., 163.
29. Ibid., 162.
30. Ibid., 60.
31. Ibid., 176.
32. Stuckey, “Frank London Brown,” 671.
33. Brown, Frank London. “McDougal.” In Black Voices, edited by Abraham Chapman. New York: New American Library, 1968, 204.
34. Brown, “A Matter of Time,” in Short Stories, 3.
35. Hauke, Kathleen A. “Frank London Brown.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Trudier Harris. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1984, 76.
36. Brown, “Singing Dinah’s Song,” in Short Stories, 1.
37. Ibid., 5.
38. Brown, Frank London. “The Ancient Book.” Negro Digest 13 (March 1964): 60.
39. Ibid., 61.
40. Major, The Dark and Feeling, 103.
41. Brooks, Gwendolyn. “Of Frank London Brown: A Tenant of the World.” Negro Digest 11 (September 1962): 44.
“Backstage.” Ebony 14 (April 1959): 20.
Brown, Frank London. “Night March.” Chicago Review 11 (Spring 1957): 57–61.
———. “More Man than Myth.” Down Beat 25 (30 October 1958): 13–16, 45–46.
———. “Mahalia the Great.” Ebony 14 (March 1959): 69–76.
———. “Tuesday 10:31 am.” Vigil: New Writing by New Writers 1 (Spring 1959): 6–8.
———. “A Cry Unheard.” Chicago Review 13 (Autumn 1959): 118–20.
———. “In the Shadow of a Dying Soldier.” Southwest Review 44 (Autumn 1959): 292–306.
———. Trumbull Park. Chicago: Regnery, 1959.
———. “McDougal.” Phoenix Magazine (Fall 1961): 32–33.
———. “Chicago’s Great Lady of Poetry.” Negro Digest 11 (December 1961): 53–57.
———. “A Matter of Time.” Negro Digest 11 (March 1962): 58–60.
———. “An Unaccountable Happiness: For Kermit Eby.” New City Magazine (April 1, 1962): 14–15.
———. “Singing Dinah’s Song.” In Soon One Morning: New Writing By American Negroes, 1940–1962, edited by Herbert Hill. New York: Knopf, 1963, 348–54.
———. “The Ancient Book.” Negro Digest 13 (March 1964): 53–61.
———. “The Whole Truth.” In Black Orpheus: An Anthology of African and Afro-American Prose, edited by Ulli Beier. Ikeja, Nigeria: Longmans, 1964, 71–73.
———. Short Stories by Frank London Brown. Chicago: Frank London Brown Historical Association, 1965.
———. The Myth Maker. Chicago: Path Press, 1969.
———. Trumbull Park. Hanover, N.H.: Northeastern University Press/University Press of New England, 2005.
Brownley, Les. “Frank London Brown: Courageous Author.” Sepia 8 (June 1960): 26–30,
Dyett Academic Center, “The History of Walter H. Dyett,” http://www.dyett.cps.k12.il.us/whdyett/ (July 11, 2008).
Fleming, Robert E. “Overshadowed by Richard Wright: Three Black Chicago Novelists.” Negro American Literature Forum 7 (Fall 1973): 75–79.
Fuller, Hoyt W. “The Departed.” Negro Digest 11 (September 1962): 50.
Hawkins, B. Denise. “Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks.” Black Issues in Higher Education 11 (November 3, 1994): 16, 20–21.
Neal, Bessie L. “A Brief History of the Chicago Jean Baptiste Point DuSable League, October 2001,” http://www.artic.edu/~apalme/duslea.htm (July 11, 2008).
Serebnick, J. “New Creative Writers.” Library Journal 84 (February 1, 1959): 507.
A few letters mentioning Brown are included in Willard Motley’s papers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Memorial Library. The Path Press archives include the manuscript of The Myth Maker, and the papers of the Frank London Brown Historical Association contain photos and correspondence related to a memorial service at the Parkway Ballroom. These materials are housed in the Vivian G. Harsh Collection of Afro-American Literature, part of the Woodson Regional Library, Chicago. Most of Brown’s papers remain private.