The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932-1950

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.

Robert Bone (1924-2007) was a professor of languages and literature at Columbia University Teachers College and a pioneering scholar of African American literature. He was best known for The Negro Novel in America, Richard Wright, and Down Home: Origins of the Afro-American Short Story. His seminal essay "Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance" continues to be cited extensively in studies of early twentieth-century African American writing.

Richard A. Courage is a professor of English at Westchester Community College/SUNY.