Beyond Hurston and Wright; Toward West and Walker

Abstract

The dominance of Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropological fieldwork and Richard Wright’s proletarian fiction in popular conceptions of the FWP have helped restrict and distort the Project’s legacy in black writing. As a more compelling lens through which to assess the FWP’s influence on postwar writing that grapples with black history and identity, this chapter explores the work of former federal writers Dorothy West and Margaret Walker. In recent years, both West’s The Living Is Easy (1948) and Walker’s Jubilee (1966) have been claimed by feminist scholars but these texts also merit a re-reading within the context of the FWP—specifically how these writers employed the folklore, ethnography, and personal narratives in their fiction. Both writers open a critical space in which to examine other black writers whose work complicates the established literary-historical boundaries of black fiction.