Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935-46

Bill Mullen's Popular Fronts takes its place alongside William Maxwell's New Negro, Old Left and James Smethurst's The New Red Negro as a vitally important historical and cultural re-evaluation of the relationship between African American literature and the Communist party in the 1930s and 1940s. Deftly synthesizing from a broad range of materials--literary, cultural, historical, anthropological--Mullen chooses a digestibly specific focus on Chicago's cultural renaissance, a period he convincingly establishes as crucially significant to an understanding of African American literature in the twentieth century. My only quibble with the book--and it's a minor one--is that at times it assumes a more complete knowledge of the political landscape of the time than an average reader might have. Some more background on the history of the CPUSA and the Popular Front in general might have helped. Still, a fine study, one that I highly recommend.