Bauman Rare Books Early 2020 Online Catalogue

B L A C K H I S T O R Y & L I T E R A T U R E

B A U M A N R A R E B O O K S • E A R L Y 2 0 2 0 O N L I N E

“Attaway’s Artistic Genius Rivals That Of Richard Wright’s Native Son ” ATTAWAY, William. Blood on the Forge. A Novel. Garden City, 1941. Octavo, original russet cloth, dust jacket. $1650. First edition of Attaway’s second and final novel focusing on labor history during the Great Migration, a handsome copy in the highly elusive dust jacket. With Blood on the Forge and his first novel, Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939), Attaway is “heralded as one of the finest chroniclers of the Great Migration in the early 20th century during which multitudes of African American families fled the poverty and racism of the South” (Bader, African American Writers , 7-8). Published in 1941, the novel is closely aligned with the work of his close friend Richard Wright, as well as that of Chester Himes, Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, early stories by Ralph Ellison and Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath . In crisp and vivid prose, Attaway chronicles the lives of three half-brothers who flee the threat of lynching and dire poverty to seek a new life in the North. “At once factual and dramatic, Blood on the Forge , set in a western Pennsylvania mill town in 1919,” also offers a distinct perspective on the Great Steel Strike of 1919. Attaway opened “a new chapter in texts of black labor’s response to racism” and boldly “rewrote the early labor history of the Great Migration. In the factory story no writer of the Harlem Renaissance era told, he explodes the chimera of opportunity and… adds a needed finale to the work of Claude McKay and his contemporaries” (Hapke, Labor’s Text , 213-14). Despite the overwhelming critical success of Blood on the Forge , Attaway never published another novel, focusing instead on short fiction, music and screenwriting to become “one of the earliest African Americans to write for television and film” (Bader, 7). When novelist Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust (2009) and The Son (2013), was asked to name “his favorite book no one else had heard of,” he answered: “ Blood on the Forge , by William Attaway” ( New York Times ). Too long overshadowed, scholars increasingly assert that “Attaway’s artistic genius rivals that of Richard Wright’s Native Son . In Blood on the Forge he has contributed to American literature nothing less than a classic” (Griffin). Book fine; light edge-wear to bright and colorful about-fine dust jacket.

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