Literature of the United States

2.2 Racism reflections in literary works


American African writers about racism
One of the impacts in promoting change in society was literature. Abolitionary literary works were emotionally strained and influenced much on the minds of the Americans. Antislavery literature represents the origins of multicultural literature in the United States. It is the first body of American literature produced by writers of diverse racial origins.
Race was a subject potentially implicated all American writers, it was African Americans whose contributions most signally differentiated American modernism movement. Zora Neal Hurston drew on her childhood memories of the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, for much of her best-known fiction, including her novel «Their Eyes Were Watching God». W. Faulkner depicted a South at once specific to his native state of Mississippi and expanded into a mythic region anguished by racial and historical conflict.
The numerous writers associated with the Harlem renaissance made it impossible ever to think of a national literature without the work of black Americans, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neal Hurston attained particular prominence at the time: but others including Claude McKay and Nella Larsen were also well known.
Hughes wrote a number of powerful anti-lynching and anti-capitalist poems; but in general the movement was deliberately upbeat, taking the line that racial justice was about to become reality in the United states, or like Hurston, focusing more on the vitality of black culture than on the burdens of racism. At least part of this approach was strategic-the bulk of the readership for Harlem authors was white. Some women writers found social causes like labor and racism more important than women’s rights; others focused their energies on struggles less amenable to public, legal remedies.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is a memoir and treatise on abolition written by famous orator and ex-slave, Frederick Douglass (1818–1895). It is generally held to be the most famous of a number of narratives written by former slaves during the same period. In factual detail, the text describes the events of his life and is considered to be one of the most influential pieces of literature to fuel the abolitionist movement of the early 19th century in the United States. He was a firm believer in the equality of all people, whether black, female, Native American, or recent immigrant. He was fond of saying, «I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.»