In the early twentieth century, the Saturday Evening Post was perhaps the most popular and influential magazine in the United States, establishing literary reputations and shaping American culture. In the popular imagination, it is best remembered for Norman Rockwell’s covers, which nostalgically depicted a wholesome and idyllic American way of life. But beneath those covers lurked a more troubling reality. Under the direction of its longtime editor, George Horace Lorimer, the magazine helped justify racism and white supremacy. It published works by white authors that made heavy use of paternalistic tropes and demeaning humor, portraying Jim Crow segregation and violence as simple common sense.
Circulating Jim Crow demonstrates how the Post used stereotypical dialect fiction to promulgate white supremacist ideology and dismiss Black achievements, citizenship, and humanity. Adam Mc Kible tells the story of Lorimer’s rise to prominence and examines the white authors who provided the editor and his readers with the caricatures they craved. He also explores how Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance pushed back against the Post and its commodified racism. Mc Kible places the erstwhile household names who wrote for the magazine in conversation with figures such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ann Petry, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William Faulkner. Revealing the role of the Saturday Evening Post in normalizing racism for millions of readers, this book also offers a new understanding of how Black writers challenged Jim Crow ideology.
Inhoudsopgave
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. George Horace Lorimer and Rising Jim Crow
2. Literary Aspiration and Intimate Minstrelsy
3. Irvin S. Cobb: Making the New Negro Old Again
4. Hugh Wiley, Edward Christopher Williams, and Black Doughboys
5. Octavus Roy Cohen, the Midnight Motion Picture Company, and the Shadows of Jim Crow
6. The End of the Lorimer Era
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Over de auteur
Adam Mc Kible is associate professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is author of
The Space and Place of Modernism: The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York (2002), editor of Edward Christopher Williams’s
When Washington Was in Vogue (2004), and coeditor of
Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (2007).
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