TY - JOUR
AU - Goldsby, Jacqueline
AB - Abstract This essay draws upon Gwendolyn Brooks’ 49-year correspondence (1944–93) with her editor Elizabeth Lawrence to trace the “publishing knowledges” that Brooks gleaned during her mid-20th-century career with the US firm Harpers & Brothers. First and foremost, their correspondence richly details Brooks’s growth as an experimental poet with a mainstream commercial firm. The aesthetic sociality of their editorial debates fostered also allowed them to explore personal and political intimacies; in this dimension, their correspondence (both the letters’ contents and epistolary form) sheds light on how Brooks and Lawrence navigated the shoals of race, gender, and liberalism in the notoriously patriarchal corporate culture of mid-20th-century US publishing. Finally, the arc of Brooks’s relationship with Lawrence at Harper’s charts is how US publishing transformed from its corporate to conglomerated forms. Taken together, these epistolary threads not only weave African American poetry into the literary history of an era-defining institutional realignment but also they demonstrate how Brooks’ and Lawrence’s cross-racial solidarity and commitment to an anti-corporate poetics comprise a continuum between Brooks’s career in mainstream US publishing and her later years in the Black independent press in the late 1960s. [P]ublishing at Harper’s was a shrewd, tactical choice [that] . . serve[d] Brooks’s evolving ideologies about art and politics. In her memoir Report from Part One (1972), Gwendolyn Brooks refers to Elizabeth Lawrence, her longtime editor at Harper & Brothers, twice.1,2 Recalling the “notable . . .whites who have befriended me and assisted me along the wilder way,” Brooks singles out Lawrence for “introduc[ing] me to many publishing knowledges I had, certainly, no conception of” (Report 77). In the second reference, Brooks annotates a snapshot lauding Lawrence for “creatively engineering my publishing career.” Shortly before and after these tributes, however, Brooks disavowed her relationship with her former editor and publisher. In an interview with fellow Chicago poet and publisher Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Brooks declared that she “deplore[d]” Black writers who chose to publish with mainstream firms. “I think that these people have decided that they want ‘success’ in the American sense of the word. They want to turn out pretty little books… . [T]hey expect to make money, which is an illusion. I certainly never made money as a publishee of Harper and Row and I began with them in 1945” (Brooks, Conversations 78). Biographers point to remarks like these as evidence corroborating Brooks’s famous decision to leave Harper’s for the Black Arts press in 1967.3 Literary and book historians cite her dissatisfaction with her former firm to characterize mid-twentieth-century publishing as intrinsically antagonistic to African American writers’ creative development.4 Yet, Brooks’s public complaints about Harper’s conflict with her editorial correspondence with Lawrence. During the years that saw A Street in Bronzeville (1945), Annie Allen (1949), Maud Martha (1953), The Bean Eaters (1960), and Selected Poems (1963) published to widespread acclaim and strong sales, Brooks wrote remarkably detailed, astonishingly intimate letters to Lawrence that chart her aesthetic, professional, and personal growth. Moreover, their exchanges lasted long past 1967: the two continued discussing poetry and Brooks’s career until Lawrence’s death in 1993. Their correspondence, particularly the letters spanning their active work together at Harper’s (1944–64), not only details the “publishing knowledges” Brooks learned while collaborating with Lawrence. Their epistolary exchanges also offer a crucial lens onto African American poetry’s relation to the “feeling for books” (to recall Janice Radway’s apt concept) that characterized US publishing during the period after World War II but before civil rights. Read in the context of the protocols that typified author–editor relations in the 1940s and 1950s, Brooks’s and Lawrence’s spirited dialogues defied the masculinist culture and politics of the mid-twentieth-century literary marketplace, a literary history more often traced through the prose careers of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin.5 Analyzing their letters for their manifest content and their epistolary structures of address, I explore how Brooks and Lawrence used the work of art to negotiate the racial and class power imbalances between them. Whether debating Brooks’s codex-bending page layouts in A Street in Bronzeville; culling and curating the Selected Poems; or striving to make it possible for Brooks to earn her living principally as a published poet, the women forged a place for innovative verse at a mainstream firm and, in that process, developed an enduring social bond through their shared aesthetic commitments.6 The baseline of trust that Brooks and Lawrence established not only allowed them a remarkable personal intimacy but also discloses that Brooks’s “integrationist” outlook offered a more tough-minded critique of racial liberalism than she herself recalled in retrospect. Finally, their navigations of Brooks’s “writing program” (Lawrence’s phrase) reveal US publishing’s transformation from its corporate to conglomerated form, allowing us to consider African American poetry’s place in that institutional realignment. If Brooks was right to “break” from Harper’s, she did so for complex reasons. Though she shifted her allegiance and cultural capital to the emerging Black Arts press, her correspondence with Lawrence reveals that, at mid-century, Harper & Brothers valued Brooks’s work for its artistry, unlike Harper & Row (and then HarperCollins), which sought to monopolize it as a commodity. In the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, Brooks and Lawrence followed a “wilder way” and created the aesthetic space and reading publics for Brooks’s verse to thrive. 1. “She Made Books”: Elizabeth Lawrence at Harper & Brothers7 By the time Brooks submitted her first poetry manuscript to Harper & Brothers in 1944, Lawrence had earned her way into the post of senior editor in the firm’s trade books division.8 However, answering to Editor-in-Chief Cass Canfield meant Lawrence had to compete against the many other “hot shot” young men whom Canfield handpicked to staff the firm’s editorial posts.9 Where Canfield prided himself on creating a highly congenial workplace for authors and editors alike, Cornelia Bessie (one of the few women editors hired during Lawrence’s tenure) recalled the institutionalized sexism that characterized both Harper’s and the industry at large: Do you remember Papa Knopf’s phrase, which was printed somewhere, which was: “Women should pay to be in publishing, they shouldn’t expect to be paid.” He said this in the 50s, on record. No one else would’ve dared say it; but they would have acted on it. At that time, Papa Knopf could say that, cheerfully, and the women in publishing were quite aware of it. Certainly, that was true of my time at Harper. (McNamara) To be sure, patriarchal sensibilities like Knopf’s are worth historicizing and analyzing in their own right, as is the institutional impact of women editors in twentieth-century US publishing. Blanche Knopf is the most studied, given her centrality to the firm founded by her husband Alfred and their shared (but rivalrous) ambition to modernize the art of bookmaking in the commercial trade press.10 While Toni Morrison’s tenure as an editor at Random House (1967–83) certainly deserves more than the admiring glances it has received thus far, Lawrence and her contemporaries have been understudied for the key roles they played shaping mid-twentieth-century American letters.11 One of just two female senior editors at Harper’s able to greenlight manuscripts on her own, Lawrence wielded enormous influence throughout the firm for three reasons.12 First, she cultivated authors whose literary talents garnered critical acclaim and generated strong sales. Lawrence edited over 100 authors during her near 30-year career at Harper’s, including Adrienne Rich, Ted Hughes, and John Updike, in addition to Brooks.13 Betty Smith’s sales-smashing success with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) all but guaranteed Lawrence’s own: Harper’s could neither ignore nor stand to lose an editor whose author sold three million books.14 Lawrence’s second talent was one any writer would want to have at their disposal: her skill at reading and evaluating manuscripts. By all accounts, Lawrence’s margin commentaries were impeccable. As one colleague raved, “[t]hey were a publishing course [in themselves]” (McNamara 1997), unlike Poetry magazine’s lead editor at mid-century, Karl Shapiro, whose laissez-faire style with authors left little record at all. As one scholar explains, Shapiro “either accepted a poem or he didn’t, [and] he did not like to suggest many changes or to discuss his preferences with poets in long-winded letters” (Oostdijk 74). Lawrence, in contrast, wrote savvy evaluations that conveyed her deeply felt response to Brooks’s way with language. She was acutely prescient when it came to judging a work’s literary appeal. Finally, Harper & Brothers’s surprisingly porous corporate hierarchy made it possible for Lawrence to act with great latitude to cultivate the authors she worked with. For instance, the firm’s editorial chain of command was so loosely linked that editors operated without strong oversight. “We went on the theory of finding good editors to head the various departments and letting them alone, except for keeping a check on their sales, operating costs and profits,” Canfield explained (113). This arrangement thwarted the influence of centralized power figures because editors were not answerable to one another for their aesthetic choices. According to Canfield, “at Harper’s we encourage[d] editors to make their own decisions about what to publish, since we distrust[ed] the committee, compromising approach. Our meetings consist[ed] mainly of reports on books which have been accepted and general discussion of future projects” (197). Within this protocol, Lawrence could—and did—recruit a widely diverse set of authors with whom she developed direct, highly personalized relationships.15 The firm’s credo that “[a]n editor is well advised to watch the author rather than the trend, to stand by his convictions when he believes in a writer’s creative talents” (Canfield 143) freed Lawrence to do just that when Brooks submitted the radically experimental Annie Allen for publication and when Maud Martha took nearly seven years to reach print. Paradoxically, the corporate structure of Harper & Brothers facilitated a more egalitarian relationship between Brooks and Lawrence. In this regard, Lawrence’s facility at “recogniz[ing] the worth of both commercial and literary imperatives” exemplifies one of Radway’s central arguments in A Feeling for Books (1997); namely, that publishing and reading books became enormously popular and profitable after World War II because the mainstream literary establishment “refused to perpetuate the distinction between two forms of value” (60, 153). As Radway explains: The literary … could not simply be subordinated to the commercial, just as the commercial could not be finally subordinated to the literary. . . . [E]ditors themselves recognized the worth of both commercial and literary imperatives, they vacillated frequently in the privilege and priority they accorded to each, and they sought books that vibrated productively with a tension produced by an author’s willingness to serve both sets of concerns. (60) However, the publishing industry’s racial insularity exacerbated these tensions, which also structured African American literary production after World War II.16 As John K. Young argues, the commercial and literary imperatives shaping US publishing’s interests in African American authorship were always vexed by the fetishization of Blackness for its market value. For instance, Jean Toomer did not want to be identified as the “Negro author” of Cane, but Boni and Liveright trumpeted that very point in its 1923 promotion campaign for Toomer’s prose-poem novel (3). Editors at Knopf were intrigued by first-time novelist Nella Larsen’s work Nig but changed the author’s self-chosen title to Passing because the former term “might be too inflammatory for a novel by an unproven writer,” whereas “‘Passing,’ and the phenomenon’s connection to miscegenation, would incite interest without giving offence” (qtd. in Young 3). Most scandalously, the Book-of-the-Month Club required Wright to cut the masturbation scenes from Native Son (1940), along with passages that hinted at Mary Dalton’s sexual desire for Bigger Thomas, if the novel were to be offered as the club’s main pick (3). At mid-century, the price of gaining greater access to mainstream publishing venues—and with it, intensifying the literary marketplace’s reification of race—left Black authors no quarter to cultivate their craft fully or freely, according to Young, because “[t]he American publishing industry . . . historically inscribed a mythologized version of the ‘black experience’ onto all works marked by race, in much the same way that, for much of the twentieth century, American jurists ascribed an innate blackness to all bodies marked as such, even if at the invisible and seemingly unknowable level of a drop of blood” (4). And yet, the mid-century also gave rise to an aesthetic insurgence in Black writing, with works as diverse and complex as Margaret Walker’s For My People (1942), Melvin Tolson’s Rendezvous with America (1944), Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door (1947), Dorothy West’s The Living is Easy (1948), and, of course, Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room (1953 and 1956, respectively) published by mainstream white firms. During her years at Harper’s, Brooks helped energize this movement, and the duration of her tenure there did not automatically betray her aesthetic and political commitments. On the contrary, publishing at Harper’s was a shrewd, tactical choice because Lawrence’s editorial practice was malleable enough to serve Brooks’s evolving ideologies about art and politics as well. [P]ublishing at Harper’s was a shrewd, tactical choice [that] . . . serve[d] Brooks’s evolving ideologies about art and politics. 2. From Bronzeville to Manhattan: A Politics of the Post As a member of the South Side Poetry Group, Brooks was engaged in deep study of modernist poetry in the 1940s. The collective probably discussed publishing venues often since, in Chicago, members had access to internationally renowned platforms to place their work.17 Brooks certainly took advantage of her hometown’s networks. The Chicago Defender’s “Lights and Shadows” column featured 75 Brooks poems during the late 1930s and 1940s, while modernism’s flagship journal, Poetry, published two sonnets that Brooks would later present in her debut volume, A Street in Bronzeville.18 These forays boosted Brooks’s confidence to enter the Midwestern Writers’ Conference prize competition, which she won three years running, between 1943 and 1945. These successes prompted Knopf editor Emily Morrison to solicit Brooks’s work for a possible book—which Morrison turned down because the manuscript lacked thematic coherence. As Brooks recalled, Knopf wanted her “to center my ideas in the background I really knew something about,” or the poems “that dealt with Negroes. [Morrison] said that was my forte” (Conversations 32). Brooks revised her poems “to take my own street and write about a person or incident associated with each of the houses on the block.” However, on 18 July 1944, she sent the new manuscript to a different firm—Harper & Brothers. Her query letter bespeaks Brooks’s confidence in subtle, sly ways. The letter is not addressed to Lawrence by name but to an impersonal set of “editors.” Similarly, the firm is noted without its full business address, as if to imply a mail carrier would know where the company was located in “New York City, New York.” The note itself is brief, just five, standard-sounding lines: Brooks announces the manuscript is enclosed, declares her wish for the firm to consider it for publication, and closes with an offer to “furnish illustrations for as many poems as you like by a well-known Chicago interpreter of Negro life.”19 This last point was a remarkable suggestion to make, not only because it showed an audacious faith in a publisher’s willingness to invest such resources in a first-time author’s volume (of poetry, no less).20 This request also indicates how thoroughly Brooks envisioned the book as a completed literary artifact. In her mind’s eye, she could see what A Street in Bronzeville looked like on the page, with the poems’ intermedial figuration as visual images. Thus, the reserve that seems to characterize Brooks’s self-introduction in fact belies her considerable tenacity. Her boldness emanates from the physical format of the letter itself.21 The margins at the top, bottom, and both sides of the page are so wide that the lines composing the letter appear to float in space, luring a reader’s eye to fix the text on the page. The letter’s layout of Harper & Brothers’s and Brooks’s addresses etherealizes the text: without a street name or number, “New York City, New York” drifts in place from the over-wide left margin to the center of the page. This line placement draws the reader’s attention to Brooks’s Chicago address, which hovers conspicuously at the top right corner of the letter’s page. Set on an angle that links them together on a diagonal, the placement of the addresses suggests a chiasmus-informed point: Chicago’s presumed provinciality cannot be assumed nor can New York City’s predominance as the nation’s literary capital. For a poet who reveled in typographical play (so much so that Lawrence would later advise her to curb those whims), the page layout of this letter (together with its apparent slips in epistolary etiquette) stylizes Brooks to seem like a literary naïf when, in fact, the opposite was true.22 As much as she did have to learn about the publishing industry and would, over the course of her years with Harper’s, professionalize herself as a poet, Brooks approached the firm as an author who was eager but determined to actively shape her literary career. As befits the business practice of a long-established corporation like Harper & Brothers, Lawrence’s letters to Brooks are all typewritten. So are Brooks’s to Lawrence with one exception: whenever her books’ reception surpassed her expectations, Brooks composed handwritten letters to Lawrence. For instance, after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Annie Allen in 1950, Brooks put pen to paper to say: “I was so touched by your gift of flowers. The card made me want to cry. I have been wanting for years to make you proud. Because always you have gone out of your way to help me and to please me.”23 Glee-filled over Maud Martha’s first wave of critical acclaim, Brooks scribbled: “We were both hopeful, of course, but I am really amazed, [sic] at the response the book is getting. How I thank you for urging me to ‘novelize’ my material!”24 In handwriting, Brooks revealed herself to be more spontaneous and vulnerable than typewritten, posterity-conscious, carbon-copied letters presented her to be. On Lawrence’s end, the carbon copies that chronicle her side of their correspondence encode how she transgressed the firm’s corporate norms. For instance, the letters housed in Harper’s archives are haunted by a striking absence: Lawrence’s actual, physical signature never finishes her letters to Brooks. Instead, a luminous blank space yawns open between her closing salutations and Lawrence’s typewritten name, and insistently so, given the consistent record of Brooks’s cursive signature on her letters and Lawrence’s increasingly affectionate terms of address, whereby “Miss Brooks” becomes “Gwendolyn,” then “Gwen,” and author and editor close their letters “respectfully,” “very sincerely,” “affectionately,” and with “love.” However, the original letters Brooks received from Lawrence—those that left the corporate domain—bear a striking emblem of Lawrence’s presence: the editor signed those missives in green (not blue or black) ink, often adding margin notes and postscripts that amplified her typewritten thoughts. In turn, Brooks wrote vigorous responses directly on Lawrence’s letters, creating the “publishing workshops” Cornelia Bessie admired so much.25 In these ways, Black poet and white editor refused the standard business practice that codifies a foundational condition of letter-writing itself, the “ambivalent commitment to communicative union” (Hewitt 119). We often write letters distrusting that the recipient will understand what we write because we can never know for sure if the recipient will be present to receive the letter. We write because someone is not physically present for or to us; our letters are addressed to a void. As critic Anne Bower explains in Epistolary Responses (1997): “Letters highlight the gap (physical space, time, emotional difference, slippage between sign and signifier, aporia—it takes so many forms) between correspondents. In letters we confront our ever-present awareness of that gap, and, while at times using distance to protect ourselves, we usually struggle to overcome it” (6). Strikingly, however, Brooks and Lawrence reveled in surmounting the gaps that this theory of letter-writing suggests. Several of their letters remark upon the missed chances to connect in Chicago when Lawrence traveled cross-country, but they just as often managed to meet. The women wrote each other consistently, whether a manuscript was involved or not. Tellingly, they responded within two or three days to the other’s note, sometimes on the very day a letter arrived in New York or Chicago, and they sent many letters via express Air Mail. “I certainly appreciate the ‘bulletins’ you send,” Brooks appended to one letter. “It’s exciting to open the mail box.”26 As Brooks’s remark suggests, the regularity and speed of their correspondence bolstered her trust in Lawrence. Nonetheless, the nonverbal cues embedded in their epistolary practice highlight how racism structured the power gap their letter-writing negotiated so carefully. On the one hand, Lawrence’s absent signature from Harper’s collection of her letters naturalizes corporate capital’s enmeshment with white racial privilege, precisely through the disavowal that the blank space confers. On the other hand, the gap where Lawrence’s handwritten name should appear figures how she and Brooks could—and did—forge a different kind of union. Theirs was not a perfect alliance, but it was distinct from the dynamics that would ordinarily govern their contact with one another as Black author and white editor. Where the corporate archives reenforce the social, geographic, and cultural hierarchies that divided them, Brooks’s personal-authorial archive records how she and Lawrence negotiated the industry’s rules of racist engagement. For instance, most writers use their homes to write, creating a porous boundary between the market and their private domestic space. However, tracking Brooks’s multiple addresses maps how racism structured her career as an African American woman poet living in Chicago: redlining, restrictive covenants, and housing loan discrimination gave rise to the kitchenettes that Brooks described in A Street in Bronzeville and lived in herself during the early years of her career.27 She wrote often to Lawrence about using her literary earnings to escape these injustices of segregation. “There is a place I am so eager to buy, we are all on fire about it—near here: the well-kept property of one careful white-haired couple for twenty years: six rooms, two-story, firm brick: tight, ceilinged basement: gas heat: bargain price for Chicago. Right for us—except that we are blocked by our lack of sufficient down payment.”28 Lawrence, who was married but did not have children, welcomed Brooks’s family photographs, which she proudly displayed at her Harper’s office. “I keep the picture of the children on my desk just for cheer. They are loves—and so jolly,” Lawrence beamed.29 Because publishing’s sexist culture barred Lawrence from the restaurants her male colleagues frequented among themselves and with their male authors, she often rendezvoused with Brooks for martinis on business layovers in Chicago, and in between visits and editing sessions by mail, they swapped recipes and references about painters and poets they wanted the other to see and read.30 Their letters concerning Brooks’s marriage are most astonishing. Despite earning advances for each of her Harper’s books and collecting small but steady royalty checks, by Christmas of 1949 Brooks admitted: “poverty has directed me to take a job.”31 Six years later, Brooks vented frankly: “You kindly asked about Henry’s business. It is a three-year failure, but one he clings to exclusively in spite of starvation real and unglamorous. Obviously, I must work. I can’t see the kids hungry.”32 Lawrence tried to offer Brooks solace: [W]hat you tell me of yourself is disturbing, for I had hoped that the Blakelys were having clear sailing these days. It is always hard to affirm that another person’s confidence in himself is justified, but the period of waiting and proving can be terribly difficult on those nearby. I can see why you feel the need of getting something to do outside the home and I think that such a move might turn out to be a fine one for all concerned.33 Exchanges such as these are compelling not for the marital secrets they disclose; rather, these letters convey how boldly Brooks and Lawrence transformed their corporate relation. These documents exist because Brooks and Lawrence, as author and editor, conducted literary business under the aegis of Harper & Brothers. Because every letter between them was always open to scrutiny by other staff at the firm, the trust that led them to share such secrets was shaped by an “audience-oriented privacy” (Hewitt 16). Surely aware that their exchanges were subject to the eyes of others in the corporation, Brooks and Lawrence could—and did—question the gendered and racialized modes of rational consent that their contractual relationship as author and editor typically required. The most telling artifact of their anticorporate relationship is, literally, the contract for A Street in Bronzeville. Brooks signed that official agreement promptly, but so did her baby boy; young Henry smudged the document with his jelly-stained fingerprints.34 Though Brooks offered to re-sign a clean copy, she returned the one bearing the baby’s mark, to which Lawrence replied in conspiratorial kind: “It will not be necessary to replace the other contract bearing Henry’s fingerprints. In time it may be a historic document and the more interesting with such a defacement.”35 In this instance, the women deliberately flaunted corporate protocol to acknowledge Brooks’s multiple roles as a Black poet whose life as a dedicated mother could not be compartmentalized from her professional identity as an artist. Or, as Brooks explained to Lawrence: “I write while scribbling, sweeping, washing, ironing, cooking: dropping the mop, brook, soap, iron, or carrot grater to write down a line, or word. Writing is the only work in which I’m interested.”36 Honoring Brooks’s literary labor in this primary—even primal—way, their correspondence reconfigured the political and affective claims of their contract by demonstrating how mutually constitutive those realms actually functioned. Put another way, the “feeling for books” that made Brooks and Lawrence’s editorial alliance so productive was not solely explicable as an outcome of reading hermeneutics. Rather, their letter-writing, mediated by their corporate roles as author and editor, enabled the women to make something new, through the work of Brooks’s art. 3. The Order of Things: Making A Street in Bronzeville “You forget that I knew you first through your writing. It is always interesting to discover that people who are startingly articulate and effective on paper come in quiet packages as they so often do,” Lawrence remarked about a new poem Brooks added to A Street in Bronzeville—the first draft of “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith.”37 However, their discussions did not start until two men had made the first decision about the book. Having arrived at Harper’s unsolicited, the manuscript was routed to Edward Aswell—Wright’s editor—probably because the poems clearly referenced Black subjects and Wright’s terrain, Chicago. Wright’s evaluation has become infamous in Brooks criticism because the novelist dismissed “the mother” as unworthy of literary treatment. As Wright callously punned to Aswell, “Maybe I’m simply prejudiced, but I don’t think that poems can be made about abortions; or, perhaps the poet has not yet been born who can lift abortions to the poetic plane.”38 Undaunted, Brooks insisted that the poem remain in the collection. “The stressed thing in ‘the mother’ was not the matter of abortion but the fact that the woman wanted many children but knew all she could guarantee them was poverty,” she wrote back to Lawrence. Brooks’s editor agreed.39 Brooks knew Wright’s opinion because Lawrence sent his full report directly to Brooks and disclosed his identity. Lawrence followed this practice with all of Brooks’s books because she believed in frank communication with her authors. Kind but sparing no punches, Lawrence urged Brooks to reconsider the manuscript’s working title because she sided with Wright that A Street in Bronzeville was too site-specific.40 But Brooks rejected her editor’s suggested revision forthrightly: “A title with ‘and other poems’ does sound loose, vague—is unpunchy. Also, WHEN YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN SUNDAY [sic] does not set the stage for the entire collection.”41 The “other poems” in the collection were the subject of numerous exchanges between poet and editor, but none as consequential as the “Ballad of Pearl May Lee.” This poem stirred dissension among Harper’s in-house readers because, as one objected, the poem was “the one synthetic note in the collection.”42 This was an ironic critique to lodge since the ballad hews to canonical form and explains why the poem’s speaker winds up in a Chicago kitchenette: she survived the lynching of her lover and has fled the South only to relive her trauma up North.43 For Lawrence, the persistence of the ballad stanzas and meter underscored the brutal killing that Pearl May Lee recounts, justifying the poem’s mise en scène and its logical place in the collection: “the theme of the poem itself is raw, unpleasant, and unsubtle, but it’s part of the overall picture and, I think, belongs.”44 But other editors continued to disagree, arguing against the poem’s publication as late as the page proof stage.45 Lawrence’s strategy to defend “Pearl May Lee”’s inclusion seems, at first glance, deeply problematic. To quell the dispute, she “[took] a vote around the office and [found] an overwhelming majority on my side.”46 Heading toward publication, she proposed to send the galley proof of that single poem “to readers whose poetic judgment we trust,” and the reader Lawrence had in mind: not Wright, but Mark Van Doren.47 Subjecting Brooks’s antilynching ballad to group polls among white readers and poets arguably smacks of racial condescension, but Brooks harbored her own doubts about the poem’s strengths and wondered if she should keep it in the collection, too.48 This ambivalence anticipated the strength of Lawrence’s editorial process, which not only allowed for but depended on dissent. As she explained to Brooks, “it is better to have these opinions brought out in the open before rather than after book publication.”49 Different from hedging a bet (or, worse, shaping Brooks’s poetry to white focus groups’ expectations), Lawrence’s strategy avoided a pitfall of Harper’s system of decentralized accountability, where a single editor’s voice could possibly dominate an author’s creative process. Instead, Lawrence’s approach bespeaks a commitment to deliberation, making judgment a process of agency and answerability, dialogue and debate, and reading and recognition that leads to “the limits of argument” where expansion—not narrowing—occurs.50 In Chicago, Brooks thrived in such exchanges with the South Side Poetry Group: “We would light into each other’s poems with great spirit,” she recalled. “It is the only poetry group I’ve ever encountered where people really told each other what they thought.”51 Meshing with Lawrence’s principle of frank reciprocity—but without guarantees of agreement in advance—“Pearl May Lee” claimed its place in A Street in Bronzeville, and Brooks’s aesthetic agency was further strengthened by such critical engagement. A different debate clarified the stakes of Lawrence’s deliberative process and its influence on Brooks’s poetics. A Street in Bronzeville’s gritty lyricism depended on the order of the poems as much as their topics and versification, leading Brooks and Lawrence to jostle back and forth about the table of contents. Where Brooks began the editorial process willing to cede to Lawrence’s experience—“you will know more than I about the best time for presentation [that is, the book’s release], about the length, and the arrangement of pieces”—by the time page proofs were due, she demanded: “Enclosed is a table of contents with several changes in the order. Also, (1) I’d like to dedicate the book to my parents, (2) I’d like to eliminate some of the ‘fluffery’ in front of the sonnet sequence, and (3) I see there are now two ‘Smiths’; since they were not intended to be relatives Hattie’s last might better be ‘Scott.’ Does it sound right? Sheets are here to illustrate.”52 However, galley proofs proved difficult for Harper’s to prepare without creating “typographic perplexities.” As Lawrence explained to Brooks, her proposed sequences confused the printers, who could not figure out how to compose half title pages for the group poems without creating the same for standalone poems.53 When A Street in Bronzeville was released on V-J Day (15 August 1945), the book realized Brooks’s verse vision. Sticking with her original title, A Street in Bronzeville, the book honored the social geography mapped by the poems and the conceit’s impulse to render its Black life world intact. The original dust jacket illustrated Brooks’s ideal perfectly: an aged, sooty brick wall of a tenement apartment building fills the cover; the white-lettered font draws attention to the coarsened stone background. Pleased not to see stereotyped images of Black poverty on the book’s cover, Brooks thanked Lawrence: “I am greatly impressed with the jacket. It’s eye-catching, suggestive, and dignified… . How happy I am that there are no little funny figures, with patches, open collars, and so on!”54 Harper’s first print run was excitingly large: “By the date of publication we expect the sale of something over 2,000 copies, which is excellent for the first volume of poetry,” Lawrence enthused to Brooks.55 Harper’s launched a serious marketing campaign to stir sales as well. Circulars were sent to “the top bookstores” across the country, “quoting [Stephen Vincent] Benét and [Richard] Wright and indicating our own enthusiasm about the poetry.”56 The firm also took out ads in Publishers Weekly, The New York Times Book Review, the New York Herald Tribune, the Chicago Sun, the Saturday Review of Literature, and its own Harper’s Magazine.57 For her part, Brooks’s early placements of poems in Poetry magazine and Common Ground primed readers to seek out the book once it hit the stands. As advance notices circulated in the Black press, Brooks joyfully planned local book parties in Chicago.58 After its initial print run, A Street in Bronzeville averaged 86 sales per week. As Lawrence explained to Brooks, “While these figures may not seem large to you, they are quite unusual for the first volume of poetry.” 59Publishers Weekly corroborated Lawrence’s view. “As a general rule poetry is not a profitable commodity,” the Weekly’s reporter declared, because trade presses face “large overhead and chances of profit” could not be reached on books that would likely only see a print run of 400 copies (Albright 165). Surpassing that benchmark fourfold, A Street in Bronzeville earned Brooks the incalculable payoff of literary consecration. Positive reviews showered down from all of the periodicals where Harper’s placed advance ads; the Black press raved about the book; national prizes came Brooks’s way: she was named one of the “Ten Young Women of the Year” by Mademoiselle in 1946, and for two years running she won Guggenheim Fellowships (1946–47).60 As Lawrence reflected this glow, “I’m glad that you like the way that Harpers has presented and promoted the book. We have, I believe, succeeded in establishing you as a really important new writer and this should bear fruit when your novel comes along.”61 Lawrence was right to distinguish between the earning power that poetry publishing could offer—prestige and cultural capital—compared to prose fiction, which could offer those perks and “bear fruit.” Brooks understood poetry’s uncertain strength in the literary marketplace, too (“not many plans to get rich writing poetry,” she commiserated with Lawrence)—an essential “publishing knowledge” that her $200 advance confirmed.62 “Ordinarily no [such] payment is made for a volume of poetry—for the returns, even in the case of an established poet, are unpredictable,” Lawrence explained to Brooks, even when the poet wins a Pulitzer Prize, as Brooks would do with her next book, Annie Allen.63 4. White Editors, Black Authors, and the Liberal Imagination Later scholars often diminish and Brooks herself dismissed her early works’ formal innovations and critical acclaim as achievements blinkered by mid-century “integrationism.” To be sure, Brooks and Lawrence’s correspondence is vexing to interpret because their exchanges about race and racism sound like the liberal humanism which Black nationalist, feminist, and post-structuralist critique have discredited as politically suspect, if not bankrupt.64 Filtered through those critical sieves, for instance, Lawrence’s recommendation for Brooks’s Guggenheim application grates: “no doubt the propagandists who hope to solve the race problem with bludgeons are useful after their fashion but it is heartening to know that there are artists with vision whose compassion for their own group is not an exclusive thing. I believe sincerely that Gwendolyn Brooks is such an artist.”65 Brooks’s declarations against didacticism smack of elitism (“it does seem to me that Negro poets, from now own, will have to avoid clichés and worn out language, because the public won’t accept, much longer, that pure propaganda dished out in broken-up line and called ‘poetry’”), and her faith in formalism blinded her from seeing how Manichean worldviews made African decolonization movements fragile projects of Black liberation.66 While shortsighted and even cringeworthy, statements like these are few between the many more that articulate a counterdiscourse to colorblind liberal humanism, particularly on Brooks’s part. In an early letter, she comments on the need for Black writers to address racial themes: [F]or quite a few years to come Negroes will have to go on talking about Negroes at least some of the time, for they are able to say many things that can be said best by themselves. We have the lesson to master, though, that there is more than one method of indulging self-pity.67 Here, she subtly (though in a prickly way) advocates a political economy of representing Blackness that honors the aesthetic sovereignty of Black writers, first and foremost. As Brooks asserts, Black writers “will have to go on” producing Black-themed art, because experience gives them material to work with and they can make it “best.” But just “some of the time.” Not all the time. This distinction keeps Brooks’s position from hardening into racial essentialism, as does her insistence upon aesthetic experimentation to articulate racial critique. “We have the lesson to master . . . that there is more than one method of indulging self-pity”: here, she claims stylistic innovation as key to rendering the diversity and complexities of Black lifeworlds and the pains Black people endured, inflicted from without and within.68 Lawrence is better described as a cultural pluralist rather than a colorblind liberal; she certainly was not the racist paternalist that Brooks’s early white sponsors—Inez Cunningham Stark and Paul Engle—proved to be.69 Sharing her own view of A Street in Bronzeville’s enthusiastic reception, she wrote Brooks, “I am glad that so many people are speaking up and presenting different points of view about your work. It is that exchange of opinions that helps make for growth and enlargement of an artist’s work and pushes the horizons further into the distance.”70 That amplitude extended to Lawrence’s understanding of cultural particularity, which she struggled to articulate in their exchanges about the poem “The Life of Lincoln West,” an excruciating lyric about a young Black boy’s struggle to love his dark-skinned self: Someday, I hope, you will be able to say—instead of “Negroes are like other people”—"All people have an essential dignity worthy of understanding and respect.” That’s what you really mean, isn’t it? Of course, we are alike, but “other people” is too loose a term. “Other people” are the people we do not know, except as spectators. All you can do as an artist is get at the essence of Negroes as you see them, then trust “other people” to recognize themselves and their conflicts… . For no one is “typical.” Each of us is in some degree special if an artist’s eye will search us out.71 Writing in dialogue with an editor like Lawrence, Brooks could explore prosody’s resources—for instance, the rhetoric of apostrophe’s address and rhyme royal’s densities in “the anniad”; the unsettling effects of off-rhymed sonnets in the “Gay Chaps at the Bar” sequence—to develop a language that encompassed a new humanism that regards rather than reifies racial difference as a source of “dignity”; wherein interdependence and reciprocity govern a world where no one is “typical”; wherein oppression—in all of its forms—can be “searched out” by the “artist’s eye” and represented in all of its tangled complexities. Neither Brooks nor Lawrence ever called this outlook “liberal,” but their “muddlings” (Lawrence’s word) and “gropings” (Brooks’s term) offer a provocative record of how African American poetry at mid-century confronted Cold War liberalism and its terms of engagement.72 5. “Give it a Chance”: Making and Marketing Selected Poems The last book Brooks and Lawrence prepared together was Selected Poems, published in 1963.73 By this time, poet and editor had collaborated for nearly two decades, and their trust and reciprocity flow easily in the letters they exchanged. But Selected Poems was Brooks’s to define. She took firm control over the curation process, starting with Lawrence’s recommended title for her recent compositions: “New Poems (as a title for the new additions) does have more self-possession than Addenda!” Brooks agreed, and she wanted to extend that confidence to the dust jacket design as well.74 Realizing that, by this point in her career, she did not need the endorsements of male literary stars and benefactors, Brooks confirmed, “I, too, feel that the [Nelson] Algren and [Frank London?] Brown quotations are superfluous. I do want to avoid a scrappy or disjointed look.”75 As with A Street in Bronzeville, the poems’ arrangement mattered greatly to Brooks. “In putting things together, I kept repeating to myself such words as ‘clean-cut’ (where the organization is concerned, that is)—‘stripped,’ ‘definitive—uncluttered.’”76 For that reason, she was willing to cut poems that Lawrence mapped as “borderline”—among them “Matthew Cole,” “to a winter squirrel,” and “Theresa and the Oracle.”77 However, a new poem, “Riders to the Blood-red Wrath,” opened a breach. For Lawrence, the poem had “force but not clear direction.” Brooks replied: BUT ELIZABETH! The only thing I want to scream over is Riders to the Blood-red Wrath, my salute to the Freedom Riders. I’m so old now that I know when I have written a good poem, and this is one of the best I’ve ever made. To have been maudlin, propagandistic, declamatory, or even vengeful would have been very easy. I avoided, escaped all that. I vigorously believe I made a poem that will stand as a poem outside the prevailing confusion as well as inside it (and after as well as during). Oh I hope you will reconsider and will give it a chance.78 “Riders” got its chance; it leads off the “New Poems” in the book. However, Brooks’s jocular tone is not as ingratiating as it sounds. Angling for a deliberated decision, Brooks seeks to achieve agreement with her editor. While it would have been ideal for Lawrence to recognize “Riders”’s poetic power on its own—and her own—terms, “to reconsider” and “give it a chance” entails negotiating with Brooks’s explication, an exchange that discloses the power of the poem’s meaning through Brooks’s style of the poem’s “making.” Brooks gained one of her most important publishing knowledges deciding Selected Poems’s print format. Prior to this point, Harper’s released her books as trade hardbacks. However, by 1963, the company started its own reprinting operation, launching the Torch and Colophon lines that produced mass-market paperback books. The year before, it acquired and merged with Row, Peterson & Co., a precollege textbook publisher.79 Harper’s wanted to test its new business organization with Selected Poems, a “purely experimental” approach for the firm because “Harpers has never done this on a book of poetry,” Lawrence explained.80 The goal was to publish 2,000 copies priced at $3.95 for the trade hardback market and 2,000 copies as paperbacks set at $1.65 to “get a larger distribution for your books and reach the young people in and out of college who care actively about poetry.”81 However, to maximize Selected Poems’s reach, Brooks had to trim more poems to keep the book at 128 pages, because this length streamlined printing the hard- and paperback editions.82 Brooks also had to accept less than her usual 10 percent royalty fee, whose calculus Lawrence took care to explain. “In the instances where Harper arranges a reprint edition of a book with an outside publisher, a customary royalty of 7% is paid and the money received is divided equally between Harpers and the author. So a straight 5 per cent to you is not unfair,” she reasoned and then mapped out the math: In the case of your book the paperback is part of the original printing… . We can do it only if we give a straight 5% on the paperback copies sold—which is the royalty rate given by the departments issuing Torch and Colophon reprints. A higher royalty rate makes the operation unfeasible, and if it is unsatisfactory to you we shall in all probability have to settle for the hard-cover edition alone—very likely 2000 copies or 2500 at most for the first printing.83 However, a serious trade imbalance lurked in these percentages. On the one hand, issuing a simultaneous release of Selected Poems in hard- and paperback formats to “get a larger distribution” and to “reach the young people in and out of college who care actively about poetry” recalls Lawrence’s exchange with critic-poet Alfred Kreymborg: “What you say about the heartening response to American poetry is most encouraging. I only wish that it would show up in sales figures; perhaps it will if . . . poets can establish more contacts with the reading public.”84Selected Poems broke that barrier, as Lawrence excitedly reported to Brooks: “By publication day about 1800 books (800 hardbound, 1000 paper) were in the bookstores—which is at least 800 more than could have been anticipated with hardbound alone. Apparently, there are re-orders for an order has gone through for a rush binding of 500 more copies from sheets in stock. The reactions are . . . a delight and satisfaction.”85 On the other hand, the scale at which Selected Poems could expand Harper & Row’s market share in poetry fueled this deal, which the vertical integration of its hard- and paperback operations sorely needed to make its merger with Row, Peterson & Co. worthwhile.86 However, even though the wider distribution plan and sales figures were admirable, that outreach came at a cost. Cutting poems to make the book shorter than it might have been risked foreshortening Brooks’s poetic vision, a threat that Lawrence unwittingly recognized: “Do not hesitate to speak your mind [about the changes the publishing plan required]. Quality comes before other considerations though it does not always seem so.”87 Those “other considerations” would, in fact, compromise Brooks’s control over Selected Poems after Lawrence retired from Harper’s in 1964 and the company continued the mergers and consolidations that would transform it into a media conglomerate whose interests in Brooks’s creative production subordinated quality to quantity, whose focus remained on the value of the fiscal, not prosodic, line.88 6. The End of an Era After 1964, Brooks faced new editors acculturated under the conglomerated business model. As Brooks’s biographer George Kent details, Genevieve “Gene” Young replaced Lawrence. Probably the only Asian American editor in a major house at that time—Young was Chinese—her correspondence with Brooks suggests a warm relationship. However, Young rejected Report from Part One, Brooks’s memoir published by Broadside Press in 1972.89 As Brooks completed what would become In the Mecca (1968), Young was intimidated by the complexities of that book’s centerpiece (and very long) poem; she sent the manuscript to Lawrence, who convinced Brooks to add 10 more poems and to clarify Mecca’s formal occlusions.90 Disappointed that Harper’s rejected her memoir and suspicious about its subsequent plan to consolidate her work in The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1971), in 1970 Brooks commissioned agent Roslyn Targ to represent her. Targ went after the firm with the ferocity of an avenging angel and won back Brooks’s copyright to her poems.91 A second, later quarrel confirms the end of this era: in 1998, HarperCollins (conglomerated under this name in 1989) sought to assert its contractual rights over Brooks’s oeuvre by requesting that she create an audio recording for a reprint of Selected Poems.92 The dealmaking was bitter. In response, Brooks established her own company in 2001, Brooks Permissions, to safeguard the literary legacy and market value of the poems she created during her years at Harper’s.93 Brooks’s correspondence with Young and later editors proves that she did not “break” with Harper’s fully or directly after the 1967 Fisk Writers’ Conference, as is so often claimed. Rather, the literary history that emerges from her editorial correspondence recalibrates the timing and meaning of Brooks’s career at the firm. Working back from the 1963 edition of Selected Poems to A Street in Bronzeville in 1945, Brooks’s exchanges with Lawrence reveal how their aesthetic sociality was forged through a fundamentally anticorporate logic of literary value. They collaborated to produce books that affirmed Brooks’s poems as “texts” in this specific sense of Roland Barthes’s term—as “plural,” as “a passage, an overcrossing . . . answer[ing] not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination” (159). In contrast, Harper & Row not only refused the experimental narrative of Report from Part One (a betrayal Brooks felt deeply), HarperCollins’s vision for Selected Poems sought to monetize Brooks’s voice as a brand for its burgeoning audiotext market, thus standardizing her verse into a commodity emptied of the value of its literary history. The “publishing knowledges” that shaped Brooks’s and Lawrence’s tenures at Harper’s primed them both to confront how race, gender, and class inequalities reified mainstream publishing into an operation that functioned to subsume Brooks’s creative potency and intellectual property rights, rather than a relation which aimed to foster Brooks’s authorship on her own self-determined terms. The anticorporate path that Brooks and Lawrence hewed from the 1940s to the early 1960s illuminates, then, two important precedents. First, their collaboration complicates our cultural and literary understanding of postwar racial liberalism, as their correspondence chronicles how the two women forged a cross-racial aesthetic sociality that challenged the masculinist and white supremacist norms of mid-twentieth-century US publishing. Second, Brooks’s will to adorn her verse—her restless drive toward aesthetic innovation—demanded new modes of reading to apprehend the complexities of Black life worlds as she perceived them during the 1940s and 1950s. If Lawrence struggled to comprehend Brooks’s craft, that’s because Brooks’s aesthetic ambition was to “found—tradition”: “What she had wanted was a solid. She had wanted shimmering form; warm, but hard as stone and as difficult to break” (Brooks, Blacks 245). As their correspondence attests, Brooks found her “tradition” and its “shimmering forms” by exploring her creative process in dialogue with Lawrence. Precisely because they contradict the private archival evidence, Brooks’s public accounts of her tenure at Harper’s require careful discernment. Following her correspondence with Lawrence, Harper & Brothers in the 1940s and 1950s differs from Harper & Row of the late 1960s and 1970s and HarperCollins of the 1990s. That Brooks continued to write and visit Lawrence until Lawrence’s death is no coincidence, either. Their communication endured long into Brooks’s Black nationalist years because the aesthetic sociality she and Lawrence forged at mid-century—their anticorporate politics of making Black verse—anticipated what Brooks experienced with her publisher–collaborators during the Black Arts Movement. In other words, Brooks’s radical publishing politics bear the imprint of her early years at Harper & Brothers more than contemporary critics—or Brooks herself—ever supposed and want to admit. Jacqueline Goldsby is a professor of English and African American Studies at Yale University. Endnotes 1 Unless otherwise noted, correspondence designated (P) comes from the Harper & Brothers Archives, Firestone Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Princeton University, Box 5, Folders 26–30; and Box 6, Folders 1–9. Citations marked (UIUC) come from the Gwendolyn Brooks Papers at the University of Illinois–Urbana Champaign Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Archivists graciously allowed me access to Brooks’s correspondence with Elizabeth Lawrence in Box 92, Folders 4–14, along with a select set of letters that had been processed by July 2019. I abbreviate Brooks’s and Lawrence’s names as GB and EL throughout. Quotations from Brooks’s correspondence are reprinted by consent of Brooks Permissions. 2 GB to EL, 31 Dec. 1952 (P). 3 Biographer Angela Jackson stresses Brooks’s “appeasing” relationship with Lawrence (54). George Kent and D. H. Melhem emphasize Brooks’s and Lawrence’s mutual respect. My argument is more aligned with theirs, but I spotlight publishing’s institutional transformations and their impact on Brooks’s verse practice. 4 See James D. Sullivan, “Killing John Cabot and Publishing Black: Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘Riot,’” African American Review, vol. 36, no. 4, 2002, pp. 557–69; John K. Young, “Gwendolyn Brooks’s Bibliographical Blackness,” Black Writers, White Publishers (2006), pp. 94–118. Lawrence Jackson’s The Indignant Generation (2011) presents the most encompassing critique of mainstream publishing’s compromising impact on mid-century African American literature, as does Aaron Sweeney’s dissertation Into the Citadel (2019). 5 For instance, see Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (2001); Lawrence Jackson, “Saying Things on Paper That Should Never Be Written: Publishing Chester Himes at Doubleday,” American Literary History, vol. 23, no. 2, 2011, pp. 283–310; Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison (2007); and Baldwin and Sol Stein, Native Sons (2004). 6 For a respectful but nonetheless skeptical view of Brooks’s mid-century work as experimentalist, see Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey’s introduction to Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone (2006), pp. xiii–xxi. In contrast, see Evie Shockley, “Changing the Subject: Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘The Anniad,’” Renegade Poetics (2011), pp. 27–54. 7 See Katherine McNamara, “A Conversation with Cornelia and Michael Bessie (I).” 8 “People You Should Know About,” Publishers Weekly, 26 Oct. 1964, p. 29. Lawrence joined Harper’s as a slush file reader, graduated to the rank of copyeditor, and then earned the rank of senior editor as male colleagues were drafted to serve in World War II and the Korean War. On this trajectory, see Eugene Exman, The House of Harper (1967), pp. 240–41; Al Silverman, The Time of Their Lives (2008), pp. 181, 218, 228, 231; and McNamara, “A Conversation with Cornelia and Michael Bessie (I).” 9 On Canfield’s genteel sexism, compare Cornelia and Michael Bessie’s account with Silverman, “The Company That Was Always About Cass: The House of Harper,” The Time of Their Lives (2008), pp. 214–43; John Tebbel, Between Covers (1987), pp. 203–6, 367–70; and John B. Hench, “The Publishers Who Lunch: The Social Networking of American Book Publishers,” Book History, vol. 18, 2015, pp. 273–301. 10 See Laura Claridge, The Lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire (2016). 11 Silverman provides a useful, though gender-biased, mapping of this network. About Lawrence, he acknowledges her stature but chides her “Puritan” taste for declining Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), p. 228. 12 Head of the children’s book division, Ursula Nordstrom developed one of the most profitable and highly acclaimed backlists at the firm. See Exman, pp. 277–82. She also bungled the dust jacket design and illustrations for Brooks’s Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956). On this mistake—which Lawrence never made—see Michelle H. Phillips, “Moving In and Stepping Out: Gwendolyn Brooks’s Children at Midcentury,” African American Review, 2014, pp. 145–60, esp. note 7, p. 118. 13 “EFL Authors,” Aug. 1964. Harper & Row Archives, Series III, Box 211, Folder: “Elizabeth Lawrence.” Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscript Library. 14 Exman, pp. 240–41; Canfield, Up and Down and Around (1971), pp. 199–200. 15 Michael Bessie recalled how Lawrence used these loopholes in the firm’s policies to promote first-time women and ethnic authors. See McNamara, “Conversation with Cornelia and Michael Bessie (I).” Lawrence edited Pauli Murray’s family biography, Proud Shoes (1956), a positive experience Murray fondly recalls in her 1987 memoir, Song in a Weary Throat, p. 388. 16 Only one African American editor worked in the industry from 1945–67, Charles F. Harris. Harris began first at Doubleday (1956–67) then Random House (1967–71), before heading to Howard University Press (1971–86). See Harris’s 2005 interviews at “Charles F. Harris,” The HistoryMakers Digital Archive, n.d., web. 17 See Brooks, Report, pp. 65–68; Angela Jackson, pp. 27–33; and Kent, pp. 59–60. 18 Poetry published “Gay Chaps at the Bar” and “still do I keep my look, my identity…” in November 1944. Brooks mentions her newspaper poems in Conversations (2003), p. 27. Also see Delaney Hall, “Lights and Shadows,” Poetry Foundation, 15 Feb. 2012, web. 19 GB to EL, 18 July 1944 (P). 20 On emerging poets’ struggles to secure publishing contracts in the 1940s, see Rachel Albright, “For Love—Not Vanity.” 21 My reading of Brooks’s epistolary hermeneutics is informed by Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven, editors, Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture (2000) and Margarette Jolly, In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism (2008). 22 For Lawrence’s exasperation over Brooks’s visual design tics, see GB to EL, 25 January 1946; EL to GB, 15 February 1946; and EL to GB, 26 September 1947 (P). 23 GB to EL, 14 May 1950 (P). 24 GB to EL, 9 Oct. 1953 (P). 25 For instance, see EL to GB, 17 Oct. 1952 (UIUC). 26 GB to EL, 2 Nov. 1953 (P). 27 See Angela Jackson, p. 24; Kent, pp. 58–9, 92–4. 28 GB to EL, 24 Feb. 1953 (P). Also see GB to EL, 28 Sept. 1944 (P). 29 EL to GB, 21 Jan. 1952 (P). 30 On the exclusionary sexism of publishers’ social networks, see Hench, pp. 284–85. 31 GB to EL, 21 Dec. 1949 (P). Brooks accepted a secretarial post at Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center. After collecting just one $125 paycheck, she was laid off. See GB to EL, 27 Jan. 1950 (P). 32 GB to EL, 19 Mar. 1955 (P). 33 EL to GB, 23 Mar. 1955 (P). 34 GB to EL, 2 Nov. 1944 (P). 35 EL to GB, 8 Nov. 1944 (P). 36 GB to EL, 28 Sept. 1944 (P). 37 EL to GB, 30 Oct. 1944 (P). 38 Wright to Aswell, 18 Sept. 1944 (P). Wright otherwise praised the manuscript and insisted that Harper’s issue Brooks a contract and an advance. 39 GB to EL, 28 Sept. 1944 (P). 40 EL to GB, 22 Sept. 1944 (P). 41 GB to EL, 12 Mar. 1945 (P). 42 EL to GB, 20 Mar. 1945 (P). 43 I explicate this poem more fully in Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret (2006), pp. 1–4. 44 EL to GB, 20 Mar. 1945 (P). 45 EL to GB, 2 Apr. 1945 (P). 46 EL to GB, 20 Mar. 1944 (P). 47 EL to GB, 2 Apr. 1945 (P). 48 GB to EL, 28 Sept. 1944 and 25 Mar. 1944 (P). 49 EL to GB, 20 Mar. 1945 (P). 50 On deliberation’s political valences, see Amanda Anderson, Bleak Liberalism (2016), p. 97. 51 Brooks, Conversations (2003), p. 31. 52 GB to EL, 21 Feb. 1945 and 12 Mar. 1945 (P). 53 EL to GB, 20 Mar. 1945 (P). 54 GB to EL, 30 June 1945 (P). Brooks abhorred primitivist depictions of Black people; see GB to EL, 28 Sept. 1944 and 25 Oct. 1944 (P). 55 EL to GB, 10 Aug. 1945 (P). 56 EL to GB, 10 Aug. 1945 (P). 57 EL to GB, 10 Aug. 1945 (P). 58 GB to EL, 21 Feb. 1945 and 3 Aug. 1945 (P). On Chicago’s reception, see Angela Jackson, pp. 36, 40. 59 EL to GB, 14 Aug. 1945 (P). 60 See Kent, pp. 73–74; Melhem, pp. 18–19. Brooks’s mid-century consecration deserves sharper consideration than Steven Gould Axelrod gives it in “Gwendolyn Brooks and the Middle Generation,” Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, & Co. (2003), edited by Suzanne Ferguson, pp. 26–40. 61 EL to GB, 14 Sept. 1945 (P). 62 GB to EL, 16 Aug. 1948 (P). 63 EL to GB, 22 Sept. 1944 (P). 64 See Anderson, pp. 4–15; Charles W. Mills, “Racial Liberalism,” Black Rights/White Wrongs (2017), pp. 28–48. 65 EL to [Guggenheim selection committee], n.d. (P). 66 GB to EL, 25 Oct. 1944 (P). Also see her critiques of Native Son in GB to EL, 28 Sept. 1944 (P). On African decolonization, see GB to EL, 2 July 1956 (P). 67 GB to EL, 19 Apr. 1945 (P). Also see GB to EL, 28 Sept. 1944 (P). 68 Brooks amplifies these ideas in her 1950 essay “Poets Who Are Negroes,” Phylon, vol. 11, no. 4, p. 312. 69 Cunningham’s support curdled into racist condescension; see Cunningham to EL, 6 Apr. 1953 and 3 Nov. 1953 (P) and Angela Jackson, pp. 66, 76–77. Engle’s suffocating paternalism surfaces in his later correspondence to Brooks and his self-serving origin stories of how he “discovered” her. See Engle to GB, 11 Oct. 1971 and 8 June 1985 (UIUC). 70 EL to GB, 26 Apr. 1945 (P). 71 EL to GB, 10 Mar. 1954 (P). Brooks fully agreed; see GB to EL, 16 Mar. 1954 (P). 72 Mid-century Black male prose writers—Baldwin, Himes, Wright, and especially Ellison—earn critical praise for interrogating Cold War liberalism’s hegemony. However, works by David Cochran (The Color of Freedom: Race and Contemporary American Liberalism [1999]), Michael Dawson (Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies [2001]), Carol Horton (Race and the Making of American Liberalism [2005]), and Mills propose a genealogy of “Black Radical Liberalism” (Mills’s concept) to which, I would argue, Brooks’s mid-century verse belongs. 73 For a contrasting view, see Young, p. 93. 74 GB to EL, 20 Mar. 1963 (UIUC). 75 GB to EL, 20 Mar. 1963 (UIUC). 76 GB to EL, 20 Mar. 1963 (UIUC). 77 EL to GB, 18 Mar. 1963 (UIUC). 78 GB to EL, 20 Mar. 1963 (UIUC.) In Report, Brooks disavows “Riders” (189). And yet, she glosses each of its 12 stanzas, projecting herself as the poem’s speaker. In Blacks (1987), “Riders” leads off the entries Brooks retitles “1963.” Clearly, Brooks harbored ambivalences toward this poem as witness to her own literary history. 79 Tebbel, pp. 370–71; Exman, pp. 299–302; and John Thompson, “The Emergence of Publishing Corporations,” Merchants of Culture (2013), pp. 101–46. 80 EL to GB, 17 Apr. 1963, 29 Apr. 1963, 30 Apr. 1963 (UIUC). 81 EL to GB, 17 Apr. 1963 (UIUC). 82 EL to GB, 17 Apr. 1963 (UIUC). 83 EL to GB, 29 Apr. 1963 and 17 Apr. 1963 (UIUC). 84 EL to Kreymborg, 28 Nov. 1949 (P). 85 EL to GB, 30 Sept. 1963 (UIUC). 86 See Thompson, p. 111; Evan Brier, “Synergy and the Novelist: Simon & Schuster; Time, Inc.; and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and “1959 and Beyond: Mergers, Acquisitions, and Normal Mailer,” A Novel Marketplace (2010), pp. 74–101 and 127–55. 87 EL to GB, 17 Apr. 1963 (UIUC). 88 Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation acquired Harper & Row in 1987, merging with the UK’s William Collins, Sons & Co. in 1989. According to Thompson, HarperCollins is one of the “most centralized” conglomerates in the industry (114, 128). On this industry shift, see Dan Sinykin, “The Conglomerate Era: Publishing, Authorship, and Literary Form, 1965–2007,” Contemporary Literature, vol. 58, no. 4, 2017, pp. 462–91; and Brier, “1959 and Beyond.” On poetry’s precarities in this system, see Jan Clausen, “The Speed of Poetry,” The Nation, vol. 271, no. 4, 2000, pp. 38–42. 89 Kent, pp. 230–33. 90 Kent, pp. 212–13. 91 Sweeney, pp. 130–33. Targ was renowned for her fierce management of authors’ subsidiary rights, especially for translations. See Edwin McDowell, “Book Fair is a Busy Place for Agents,” The New York Times, 19. Oct. 1983, p. C23. 92 Angela Jackson, p. 134; Kent, p. 219; Sweeney, pp. 130–33. 93 Sweeney, chap. 2. Works Cited Albright Rachel. “For Love—Not Vanity.” Publishers Weekly , vol. 142 , no. 3 , 18 July 1942 , pp. 164 – 66 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Anderson Amanda. 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TI - “Something is Said in the Silences”: Gwendolyn Brooks’s Years at Harper’s
JO - American Literary History
DO - 10.1093/alh/ajab007
DA - 2021-05-26
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/something-is-said-in-the-silences-gwendolyn-brooks-s-years-at-harper-s-fFhH0L9HNp
SP - 244
EP - 270
VL - 33
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -