Title: The Muse in Bronzeville
Description: THE MUSE IN BRONZEVILLE, a dynamic reappraisal of a neglected period in African American cultural history, is the first comprehensive critical study of the creative awakening that occurred on Chicago’s South Side from the early 1930s to the cold war. Coming of age during the hard Depression years and in the wake of the Great Migration, this generation of Black creative artists produced works of literature, music, and visual art fully comparable in distinction and scope to the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance.

This highly informative and accessible work, enhanced with reproductions of paintings of the same period, examines Black Chicago’s “Renaissance” through richly anecdotal profiles of such figures as Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Charles White, Gordon Parks, Horace Cayton, Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, and Katherine Dunham. Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage make a powerful case for moving Chicago’s Bronzeville, long overshadowed by New York’s Harlem, from a peripheral to a central position within African American and American studies.
Subjects: American literature, History, History and criticism, African Americans, Intellectual life, great depression, chicago, black chicago renaissance, American literature, history and criticism, 20th century, African americans, intellectual life, United states, intellectual life
Places: Chicago (Ill.), Illinois, Chicago, Scottsboro, Harlem
People: Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, William Attaway, Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Charles White, Gordon Parks, Margaret Burroughs, Archibald Motley, Eldzier Cortor, Marion Perkins, Charles Sebree, Horace Cayton, Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, Katherine Dunham, Bill Broonzy, Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, Thomas A. Dorsey, Fenton Johnson, Margaret Bonds, Frank Marshall Davis, Willard Motley
Time periods: 20th century, Great Depression, World War 2, Cold War, 1932-1950