Sterling A. Brown, Southern Road

Sian Round (University of Cambridge)

Ed. by Justin Parks, UiT - The Arctic University of Norway
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1932

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poem collection

Resources

Sterling A. Brown’s task in his first poetry collection, Southern Road (1932), was to construct a new poetic language which could encompass the diversities and specificities of African American life in the twentieth century. Coming to prominence a decade after Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes had signalled a new era of African American poetry, Brown reinstated folk poetry into the Black tradition, and this is the greatest achievement of Southern Road.

The first introduction to Southern Road was written by James Weldon Johnson, former leader of the NAACP, who had included five of the collection’s poems in his revised Book of American Negro Poetry in 1931. …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

3067 words

Citation: Round, Sian. "Southern Road". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 October 2022 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1921, accessed 06 May 2024.]

Save this article