Toni Morrison and the post-civil rights African American novel

African American novelists of the 1950s cast long shadows. In addition to Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, worthy writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Owen Dodson, Chester Himes, Mark Kennedy, Paule Marshall, Ann Petry, and J. Saunders Redding produced books that marked a Golden Age. This era was significant not only because nascent black luminaries received fellowships, access to eminent literary publications, and prestigious civic appointments, but also because even among anonymous neophytes, there was an exponential increase in publication. While this movement waxed through the 1950s, it was waning by the time the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed. On one level, the African American novel's declining eminence can be attributed to the rise of the Black Arts Movement, a literary movement known for poetry and drama rather than extended fiction. Yet a more accurate assessment detects an incubatory aspect of the 1960s. Not only were William Melvin Kelley, Frank London Brown, William Demby, and Margaret Walker crafting works that portended the future of black narrative, but also John A. Williams, Ernest Gaines, Clarence Major, Ishmael Reed, and John Edgar Wideman commenced careers that would flower fully in the next three decades. If a premonitory energy surrounded African American novel-writing in the 1960s, then 1970 signaled a shift. No figure exemplified this transition better than Toni Morrison.