About the Author

Brian Dolinar is the editor of The Negro in Illinois: The WPA Papers. He taught history and African American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His articles have appeared in Langston Hughes Review, The Southern Quarterly, and Studies in American Humor.

Reviews

Although I have been reading and researching in this field for over a decade, I found every chapter of The Black Cultural Front: Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation a revelation. Skillfully maneuvering between explorations of aesthetics, history, and politics, Brian Dolinar teases out the many threads that produced the specific and unique expressions of Left radicalism in the life and work of Langston Hughes, Chester Himes, and Oliver Harrington.--Mary Helen Washington, author of The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s

Brian Dolinar's The Black Cultural Front is essential reading for students and scholars of the African American Left. Deeply researched and eye-opening, Dolinar brings up challenging questions about the politics of popular culture to provide a rare, ingenious, and powerfully argued reconceptualization of the literary and artistic achievements of three major black radicals.--Alan Wald, author of American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War and H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor, University of Michigan