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E-book
Author Gruesser, John Cullen, 1959- author.

Title A literary life of Sutton E. Griggs : the man on the firing line / John Cullen Gruesser
Published Oxford : Oxford University Press, [2022]
©2022

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Description 1 online resource (x, 256 pages) : illustrations (black and white)
Contents Cover -- Titlepage -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction -- 1 The Early Years -- 2 Engaging in Debate and Turning to Fiction to Make His People's Case -- 3 Championing Black Labor and Fighting for the Franchise -- 4 Risking It All in an Attempt to Become a National Author and Publisher -- 5 Transitioning away from the Novel -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary "Writing, publishing, and marketing five politically engaged novels that appeared between 1899 and 1908, Sutton E. Griggs (1872‒1933) was among the most prolific African American authors at the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast to his Northern contemporaries Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt, Griggs, as W. E. B. Du Bois, remarked, “spoke primarily to the Negro race,” using his own Nashville-based publishing company to issue four of his novels. Griggs pastored Baptist churches in three Southern states, and played a leading role in the influential but understudied National Baptist Convention. Until recently little was known about the personal and professional life of this religious and community leader: critics could only contextualize his literary texts to a limited degree and were forced to speculate about how he published them. This literary biography, the first written about the author, draws extensively on primary sources and late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century periodicals, local and national, African American and white. A very different Sutton Griggs emerges from these materials—a dynamic figure who devoted himself to literature for a longer period and to a more profound extent than ever previously imagined, but who also frequently found himself embroiled in controversy because of what he said in his writings and the means he used to publish them. The book challenges currently held notions about the audience for, and the content, production, and dissemination of politically engaged US black fiction, thereby altering the perception of the African American literature and print culture of the period"--Publisher's description
Notes Also issued in print: 2022
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Audience Specialized
Notes Description based on online resource; title from home page (Oxford Academic, viewed on April 14, 2023)
Subject Griggs, Sutton E. (Sutton Elbert), 1872-1933.
Griggs, Sutton E. (Sutton Elbert), 1872-1933
African American authors -- Biography
African American clergy -- Biography
American fiction -- African American authors -- 20th century -- History and criticism
Literary.
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
Americas (North.
HISTORY.
African American.
American.
History.
RELIGION.
Genre/Form Electronic books
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780191946738
0191946737
0192669796
9780192669797