Literature

Atlanta, less than a quarter of a century old at the outbreak of the War between the States, had virtually no literary life before that time. The older and quieter Georgia cities with their aristocratic plantation tradition regarded this community as a lusty parvenu, a hearty, pushing, rapidly growing railroad town whose citizens knew nothing of the arts. Nor did the energetic railroad builders and merchants take exception to this opinion, for they were too busy in the pursuit of prosperity to have much time for books.

In 1864 the besieged city fell before General Sherman's Union forces and was left in ruins. From that time until well into the 1870's, any incipient literary growth was atrophied by the poverty and humiliation of the Reconstruction Era, Yet these disasters brought enrichment, for they razed barriers between the social classes and thus not only cleared broader vistas for writers but removed many inhibiting customs, so that dilettante authors ceased to scribble and became professional craftsmen. Of even greater immediate importance was the wealth of subject matter provided by the war, which many had experienced at first hand. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Atlanta writings on war and reconstruction ranged from the eloquent conciliation addresses of Henry W. Grady to the sincere but sometimes embittered accounts of Myrta Lockett Avary, whose Dixie After the War has had a recent reissue.

Talent had to take a practical turn. Writers, forced to work for a subsistence, did not write for their own pleasure but became affiliated with newspapers or political publications. From its beginnings, Atlanta literature has been vitalized by its journalists. In the 188's and 1890's several gifted columnists brought forth work that later became a permanent part of the city's literature. The gentle, diffident Joel Chandler Harris adapted his enormous store of African lore to his Uncle Remus tales in which the aged Negro tells the little boy of delightful animals—Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Fox, Sis' Cow, and the wonderful Tar Baby. Bill Arp (Major Charles Smith) got out his column of humorous, designedly rustic common sense. William Henry Peck, after long journalistic experience in New York, moved to Atlanta in 1875 and wrote news articles and also numerous novels of the romantic cloak-and-sword variety. While not inventing machines Benjamin Franklin Sawyer wrote editorials and novels, his domestic chronicle David and Abigail reaching a large audience. Francis R. Goulding, living at Roswell 12 miles from Atlanta, wrote The Young Marooners, a popular book for boys that became the forerunner of the newer juvenile stories by Atlanta writers such as Madge Alford Big-ham, Eva Knox Evans, and Elizabeth Downing Barnitz.

Although there was still much verse of the autograph-book type, some poets began to bring in a more individual quality. James Bar-rick's sonorous stanzas may seem old-fashioned now, but they do not lack dignity. Of more lasting popularity was Frank L. Stanton, who was of the homespun school of Eugene Field and James Whitcomb Riley, Stanton's friend and correspondent. Known most widely for his words to such popular songs as "Mighty Lak a Rose" and "Just A-Wearyin' For You," Stanton occasionally wrote verse about Georgia life that was virile and even grim. The erudite, solitary Thomas Holley Chivers lived in Decatur near Atlanta, corresponding with Poe, charging him with plagiarism, and brooding over his own metric innovations that were to last longer than his poems.

During the early years of the new century, Atlanta brought forth no new writers of first rank. Apparently the city had found its economic footing and had rebuilt itself into a thriving commercial community with little creative impulse. Cultural groups studied the European writers, and less serious readers also seemed to prefer stories about foreign lands if the narrative was colored by a light, pleasing romance. Neither realism nor regionalism was popular in fiction. Atlanta verse also, like that of the Nation, was on the whole lifeless during these years. The only spark was lighted by the national drama league, which awoke considerable enthusiasm for the writing and production of plays. The force of this movement was shattered by the First World War, but some of its Atlanta workers became celebrated playwrights after the war.

This war, although far away in material distance, had powerful intellectual and moral effects. During the 1920's Atlanta literature entered a relentlessly analytical era. New standards of form and style were established, but first the old values were scrutinized and sometimes discarded. Cynical and violent the new writers sometimes were, but they were attaining a refreshing pungency. Laurence Stallings, injured in the war, Caused a Broadway sensation with his play What Price Glory, whose lusty humor and outspoken language revealed the author's scorn for all romantic idealization of warfare. Dramatists of a gentler outlook awakened to the abundant subject matter near to hand and began to write plays whose principal theme turned on folklore or rustic convention. Nan Bagby Stephens' Roseanne, dramatically sound and psychologically arresting, challenged hitherto indifferent Eastern audiences to interest in the Southern Negro. Lula Vollmer had a successful New York run with her mountaineer play, Sun-Up. Novelists also became sympathetically aware of Georgia's peasantry, as did Fisewood Tarleton, who lived near Atlanta and wrote of passionate, primitive men and women in his Some Trust in Chariots and Bloody Ground.

The critical faculties of the post-war writers sometimes veered toward satire. Frances Newman, who had won distinction as a book reviewer, published The Hard Boiled Virgin, the highly stylized and ironic study of a frustrated woman, and Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers, equally polished in technique and depicting a modern triangle love story. Isa Glenn's early novels, such as Heat and Little Pitchers, also are full of an amused and not wholly severe disillusionment. With Cora Potts, Ward Greene began to publish a series of savagely naturalistic but engrossing novels of Southern life in the bootleg age. Drawing on his abundant reportorial experience, Greene frequently selects as his main characters the denizens of the underworld and police court. Other journalists, some of whom paused only briefly in the city, put analysis and dissection into newsprint. Of this number were Pierre Van Paassen, William Seabrook, Don Marquis, Roark Bradford, W.E. Woodward, Morris Markey, Ward Morehouse, and Roy Flannagan.

Equally striking was the poetic renascence that sprang up late in the 1920's. A very young Atlanta poet, Ernest Hartsock, nettled by H.L. Mencken's jeers at the South as a "Sahara of the beaux arts" joined with his friend Ben Musser in establishing the magazine Bozart Contemporary Verse and began to publish the work of local and national poets. The standard of acceptance was very high. Interest was heightened by Thornwell Jacobs, president of Oglethorpe University and himself a writer of verse, who created a chair of poetry at his college and appointed Hartsock to occupy it, which he did until his untimely death in 1930. Some of the group who were writing verse at that time have since become widely known, and three of them —Ernest Hartsock, Daniel Whitehead Hicky, and James Warren, Jr. —have won the annual award of the Poetry Society of America.

No commentator has advanced a completely satisfying reason for the large number of poets in this city. Ruth Elgin Suddeth's anthology, An Atlanta Argosy, shows the work of more than 30, but there are many more writing verse. The anthologist Richard Moult has stated that of all American cities only New York has contributed as many poems to his pages as Atlanta. It has been suggested that this large number has risen in half-conscious rebellion against the prevailing commercial atmosphere. Others account for it by mentioning Atlanta's hills, trees, and streams that are so readily adaptable to nature poetry.

But Atlanta's leading poets are not nature poets in the restrictive sense. Ernest Hartsock, generally recognized as Atlanta's most distinguished modern writer of verse, was concerned with philosophic rather than visual recognitions, and his best known work, "Strange Splendor,' is so full of the excitement of cosmic speculation that abstractions seem to swirl into tangible, dazzling material shapes. Marguerite Steedman also contemplates the mysteries of faith and creation in poems that are somber but frequently full of imaginative power. Daniel Whitehead Hicky and Gilbert Maxwell, pre-eminently lyric, are concerned with nature not in a purely descriptive sense but in relation to the moods of man—his love, his spiritual isolation, his awareness of his own mortality. Minnie Hite Moody, Mary Brent Whiteside, and Anderson Scruggs use earth and sky as a background for meditative utterances, and Agnes Gray's delicately fashioned sonnets have an emotional import beyond the clear images themselves. Lola Pergament, who constantly seeks new technical forms to embody her thoughts, is notable for the intellectuality of her workmanship, especially in her use of the intrinsic, not the loosely derivative, value of words. James E. Warren, Jr.'s, verse, though deeply felt, is very scholarly, often with a foundation of history under its impressions. It is interesting to note that these writers are arrested by different aspects of Georgia's landscape Hicky by the coast, Scruggs by bare autumn fields, Mrs. Moody by city lanes and back yards, and Maxwell by the hidden, sometimes menacing, drama in the small towns. Most of this group were writing verse in the 1920's and are writing now; most of them have at least one published volume.

In recent years Atlanta has produced almost every kind of prose writings. Outstanding examples of non-fiction are Walter Cooper's histories of Fulton County and of Georgia, Haywood Pearce, Jr.'s biography of Benjamin H. Hill and Vann Woodward's of Thomas E. Watson, Walter Millis' relentless exposure of propaganda, Road to War, and Arthur Raper's two fearlessly liberal inquiries into Southern social conditions, The Tragedy of Lynching and A Preface to Peasantry. Virginia Pettigrew Clare has written an admirable critical biography of the South Carolina poet Henry Timrod in Harp of the South. The Writers' Project of the Work Projects Administration has prepared guide books of the state and of several Georgia cities.

A number of prominent newspaper writers have published their experiences and observations in book form, Mary Knight in On My Own and Mildred Seydell in Chins Up. Mrs. Seydell has also written a novel of marital and parental responsibilities, Secret Fathers. Thomas Ripley has been highly successful in his chronicle of Western "bad men," They Died With Their Boots On. Fire in the Sky, Tarleton Collier's novel of a woman's development, contributes a view of sharecropper life, which, instead of employing the traditionally brutal realism in its technique, is rather compassionate though clearsighted. Thomas Stokes, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished American reporting in 1939, presents a vivid picture of the Atlanta of his boyhood in Chip Off My Shoulder.

Fiction has slid imperceptibly from a period of criticism into one of creative abundance. The novel covers an almost illimitable range: from Parker Hord's novel of the biblical King David, A "Youth Goes Forth, to the clever, urbane mystery stories of Alice Campbell, Linton C. Hopkins, Dorothy Ogburn, Beatrice Jefferson, and Medora Field; from Thornwell Jacobs' romance of old Charleston, Red Lantern on St. Michael's, to Don Prince's satiric fantasies, Tom and Swoop. In Fox in the Cloak Harry Lee uses his gift of dispassionate, clear-cut narrative to reveal another picture of Atlanta, a city of department stores, beer parlors, movies, and middle-class homes, amid which the young artist struggles for the right to create according to his own standards. Samuel Tupper, Jr., and Minnie Hite Moody have written novels of the domestic type, Tupper gayly or dramatically and Mrs. Moody with the haunting quality of emotion that distinguishes her verse. Tupper's Some Go Up and Old Lady's Shoes are both about Atlanta society, but Mrs. Moody's more numerous books, including Death Is A Little Man and Towers With Ivy, cover American life from the South to the Middle West. Her latest book, Long Meadows, is an ample, well-documented chronicle of her own family, beginning with its immigration from the Netherlands in the eighteenth century and ending with its participation in the War between the States.

In 1936 a young Atlanta woman published a. historical novel that broke all previous sales records, won the Pulitzer Prize, and found what is generally agreed to be a permanent place in universal literature. Numerous qualities of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind explain its extraordinary popular success. Although the story is told from the viewpoint of noncombatants, it is a shrewd and graphic account of the campaign leading to the destruction of Atlanta by General Shermans Federal troops in 1864. By skillful distribution of battle pieces throughout the narrative, the author never lets them interrupt the superb sweep of her long story from beginning to end. Most important of all, she has created two characters of such vitality that they promise to be known permanently: Scarlett O'Hara, the heroine, who emerges embittered but dauntless from many tragic episodes of war and reconstruction; and Rhett Butler, the debonair and ruthless man who loves her. These two are not only compelling as individuals, but to many people they embody the indomitable spirit of Atlanta that lifted it to growth and riches after the war.

The success of this book has stimulated Atlanta authors to further strenuous efforts that already have shown remarkable results. Although the writers in the city are constantly becoming more numerous, they do not form a group or attempt to establish any particular school of writing. Each follows his own aspirations and the result is an animated variety. Most of them have been writing too short a time to have had more than one book published, but others are following rapidly.

Atlanta literature, like Atlanta, is young and vigorous. Its writers have few models of their own section to set them a regional tradition, and most of its best historical works have been produced in the twentieth century, with a keen, modern viewpoint turned upon historical events. Unlike the older Southern cities, it cannot look back deeply into the past, but it has an exciting present sustained by many writers historians, novelists, dramatists, poets who have made it one of the leading Southern centers for books and writers. The present period of fertility is too new for anything but surmise regarding its permanence. It is significant, however, that in recent years several large Eastern publishing houses have established branch offices here. Literary traditions are not being followed, but made.

Most of the Negro writers who have lived in the city have been members of the Atlanta University group. Their race has strongly influenced their literary development, and their writings have been predominantly on racial, social, and educational problems. But, although their field is less broad than that of the white writers, they have frequently performed with intensity and penetration within the range of their chosen subjects. In recent years some of them, the poets in particular, have written with a graceful and whimsical lightness. The greater part of the group, however, has continued to treat the racial question with a serious, often somber, dignity.

Walter F. White, known nationally for his efforts for the improvement of Negro political and social conditions, first received literary notice for his novel The Fire in the Flint, which depicted the struggle of a sensitive, talented Negro physician to practice in an intolerant community. This was followed by Rope and Faggot, a sincere and uncompromising study of lynching. William E. Burghardt DuBois also is known principally for his social writings, and such books as his The Souls of Black Folk are remarkable for their richly ornamental style and their tragic power of emotion. Edward Randolph Carter writes of the Negro from a decidedly theological and educational viewpoint in Our Pulpit and Block Side of Atlanta. Helen A. Writing has brought wide knowledge and keen discernment to her fictional and non-fictional studies of the Negro.

The poets, though less intense, sometimes show a greater variety. Alexander Henry Jones' verse has a pastoral and religious tone; Georgia Douglas Johnson, while writing about her own race in her poems and in her play Blue Blood, has a strong sense of its amusing side; and Thomas Jefferson Flanagan writes verse whose appealing charm is often flavored with humor. Maude McGehee, a Negro nurse, has become known for her pleasant short verses about everyday Negro affairs.

One of the most distinguished Negro writers who has ever lived in Atlanta is the critic and anthologist William Stanley Braithwaite, now an instructor in Atlanta University. Braithwaite, who won the Spingarn Medal in 1918, has produced criticism of poetry and prose and has become celebrated for his books of essays. The Book of Georgian Verse and The Book of Victorian Verse are good examples of his work.

The number of Negro writers in Atlanta is constantly increasing, and there is some indication that better social conditions are bringing a more broad and serene outlook as well as a greater boldness of utterance. The Negro writers in Atlanta have risen too suddenly to have attained the gracious ripeness that is indicated for the future, but their work is full of vitality and skill.

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