[Sterling A. Brown] realized that to express the souls of black folk, the artist has to divest himself of preconceived and false notions about black people, and create an art whose foundation is the ethos from which spring black life, history, culture and traditions. (p. 131)

[In an effort to build a self-conscious art upon folk-art, Brown] brought to Afro-American literature a quality that became one of its main currents: the ethos of black folk. (p. 132)

Early in his career as litterateur, he discovered that the representations of black peasants in most books were very different from the black peasants he had known and seen in Washington. Realizing that the images of black people in existing literature were largely false, Brown set out to correct what he saw. (pp. 132-33)

[Early] in his teaching career Brown "read the new realistic poetry in American life"—that of Frost, Sandburg, Masters...