Writer, librarian, and publisher, Dudley Randall has made significant contributions to twentieth-century American literature. A child during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, he became a poet of the next generation, and later, he helped to pioneer a third poetic era during the 1960s. Exploring racial and historical themes, introspective and self-critical, his work combines ideas and forms from Western traditional poetry as well as from the Harlem Renaissance movement. Often incisive humor and cryptic satire inform his work. Beyond Randall's contributions as a poet, his roles as editor and publisher have proven invaluable to the Afro-American community. Since he founded the major black enterprise Broadside Press in 1965, Randall has published numerous important works of black writers who have helped to shape the contemporary American literary scene.

Dudley Felker Randall was born in Washington, D.C., on 14 January 1914, to Arthur George Clyde and Ada Viola Bradley Randall. He...