This book shows how African American literature emerged as a world-recognized literature: less as the product of a seamless tradition of writers signifying upon their ancestors and more the product of three generations of ambitious, competitive individuals aiming to be the first great African American writer. It charts a canon of fictional landmarks, beginning with The House Behind the Cedars and culminating in the National Book Award-Winner Invisible Man, and tells the compelling stories of the careers of key African American writers, including Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. These writers worked within the white-dominated, commercial, Eurocentric literary field to put African American literature on the world literary map, while struggling to transcend the cultural expectations attached to their position as 'Negro authors'. Literary Ambition and the African American Novel tells as much about the novels that these writers could not publish as it does about their major achievements.

'Michael Nowlin’s Literary Ambition and the African American Novel is a provocative application of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the literary field to the work of several generations of twentieth-century African American novelists. Nowlin reveals the use these authors made of a narrative of prior black artistic backwardness and provincialism, from which they sought to distinguish themselves.  From Charles Chesnutt to Ralph Ellison, they thus hoped to ascend to the realm of 'art' as defined internationally and intergenerationally, and to put African American literature on the map of 'world literature'.'

George Hutchinson - Cornell University