James Weldon Johnson’s "The Book of American Negro Poetry", 1922 First Edition Study of African American Literary Tradition at the Dawn of the Harlem Renaissance

James Weldon Johnson

First Edition

James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American Negro Poetry. First edition, 1922. Civil rights activist, scholar, and educator James Weldon Johnson's history of African American poetry from Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Edwin Campbell to Claude McKay, Jessie Fauset, Anne Spencer, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and other writers associated with the emerging Harlem Renaissance. With 117 poems by thirty one authors, the books examines dialect verse, lyric poetry, protest writing, religious expression, and early Black modernism. Johnson compiled the anthology while serving as the NAACP’s first Black executive secretary, joining literary canon formation to the political work of an organization then campaigning against lynching and racial violence.

Johnson, James Weldon. The Book of American Negro Poetry: Chosen and Edited with an Essay on the Negro’s Creative Genius. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922. First edition. 8vo, 5 × 7½ inches. 217 pages. Johnson’s forty eight page preface begins by arguing that an anthology of African American poetry addresses both a lack of public knowledge and “the most vital of American problems,” asserting that a people’s cultural standing is measured by the literature and art it produces. He traces Black artistic creation through spirituals, the cakewalk, ragtime, blues, religious song, and written poetry, reproducing musical notation for “The Memphis Blues” and “Go Down, Moses” and discussing W. C. Handy, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Phillis Wheatley, George Moses Horton, and Frances E. W. Harper. The anthology proceeds from Dunbar’s “A Negro Love Song,” “We Wear the Mask,” and other poems through work by W. E. B. Du Bois, William Stanley Braithwaite, James Weldon Johnson, Fenton Johnson, Claude McKay, Jessie Fauset, Anne Spencer, Alice Dunbar Nelson, and additional poets. A biographical index supplies contemporary accounts of the contributors’ education, employment, publications, military service, and institutional affiliations, followed by an index of titles.

Published three years before Alain Locke’s The New Negro, Johnson’s anthology codified Black literary tradition during the early years of the Harlem Renaissance, when a younger generation of poets was gaining national publication. The preface records Johnson’s theory that spirituals, ragtime, and blues are foundational American forms whose Black origins have frequently been obscured as they entered commercial culture. The original brown cloth binding retains its printed paper spine label, heavily chipped; binding frayed at the head and foot of the spine; text block complete and internally sound but separated from the spine and front joint; moderate toning; no signatures or inscriptions. Overall fair to good condition. A first edition of Johnson’s study of African American poetry as a continuous national literature at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance.

Item #23707

Price: $450.00