Brown's literary kingdom of Southern Road is real on two scores. It is real as art. Big Boy, the guitarist of the "saints," Frankie and Johnny, and a small host of others not named here, are vital creatures. They exist pleasurably and profitably merely as specters of the mind. But they exist also as significant and creditable transcriptions of historic reality. Thus Brown's Southern Road is real also as a repository of fact. His characters are real as America's folk Negroes were real, in the real times to which Sterling Brown attributed them; and hence they are real both as representatives of a valid New Negro-ness and as a criticism of American life. It is true, as noted earlier, that Brown began to piece together his Southern Road in the twenties, during what still Renaissance years. But the impact of the volume Southern Road must probably be defined...