cover image Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths: Autobiography and the Making of the African-American Intellectual Tradition

Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths: Autobiography and the Making of the African-American Intellectual Tradition

V. P. Franklin. Scribner Book Company, $29.5 (464pp) ISBN 978-0-689-12192-0

``The autobiography has been the most important literary genre in the African-American intellectual tradition,'' declares Franklin, who teaches history and political science at Drexel University. His treatment of works by 12 mostly prominent authors emphasizes historical importance over literary analysis. He offers contextual summaries of the work and roles of people like reformer Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who fought lynching, novelist James Weldon Johnson, who emphasized the worth of black folk traditions and novelist James Baldwin, whose confessional works presaged a new crop of intimate memoirs in the 1960s and '70s. Two chapters offer useful comparisons of novelists Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, and poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Amiri Baraka. Franklin concludes, curiously, with a chapter on Adam Clayton Powell, whose 1941 election to Congress represented ``an alternative model for black political activity.'' Not only is that model in question, but numerous important autobiographies have been published since Powell's 1971 Adam by Adam. Author tour. (Feb.)