Black History Month

Black Women Writers (1950-1980)

Mari Evans, editor and contributor

Essay collection, 1984

Edited by Mari Evans, Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation is a critical history of fifteen authors: Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Childress, Lucille Clifton, Mari Evans, Nikki Giovanni, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Carolyn Rodgers, Sonia Sanchez, Alice Walker, and Margaret Walker. In the preface, editor Evans calls the book "an effort to meet an observed need." It was the first comprehensive study of those black women writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

Each of the authors included in Black Women Writers was asked to provide a statement about her life and work in response to a questionnaire; all but two complied. The writers' comments explore intentions, obstacles, and rewards. Childress, for example, discusses the distinction between writers who choose to present "winners" as exemplars of success and those, such as herself, who prefer to portray "losers" who would otherwise have no voice. Evans writes about the roles of idiom and imagery.

Each writer is also the subject of two critical essays written for the occasion by black critics, both female and male. These essays, representing differences in critical approach, vary widely in style and complexity. Among them are Ruth Elizabeth Burks's essay on language and jazz patterns in Bambara's novels and John McClusky Jr.'s piece on ritual and setting in Marshall's work. Also included in the collection are detailed biographical and bibliographical sketches of the writers.