SOURCE: Mullen, Bill. “Marking Race/Marketing Race: African American Short Fiction and the Politics of Genre, 1933-1946.” In Ethnicity and the American Short Story, edited by Julie Brown, pp. 25-46. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997.

In the following essay, Mullen points to the prevalence of racial stereotypes in short fiction during the 1930s and 1940s, and then traces the transformation of the genre by such authors as Chester Himes, Richard Wright, and others who, according to Mullen, not only achieved mass literary success but also used their works to outline a strategy of calculated racial resistance.

On January 11, 1945, the Writers' War Board issued a pamphlet titled “How Writers Perpetuate Stereotypes.” Chaired by Rex Stout, a white man, the Board had come together at the urging of blacks and white liberals concerned with the wartime perpetuation of derogatory images of blacks in the arts and mass media, from literature and...