SOURCE: “‘Endowing the World and Time’: The Life and Work of Dudley Randall,” in Tennessee Studies in Literature, Vol. 30, 1986, pp. 77-92.

In the following excerpt, Miller profiles Randall's poetry and comments on Randall's contributions towards the promotion of black writing.

Dudley Randall, poet, librarian, and publisher, is one of the most important Black men of letters in the twentieth century. A child during the Harlem Renaissance, he was himself a leading poet of the subsequent generation of Black writers, and he later became a pioneer of the Black literary movement of the 1960s. His own work, so accomplished technically and profoundly concerned with the history and racial identity of Blacks, benefits from the ideas and literary forms of the Harlem Renaissance as well as from the critical awareness of the earlier Western Renaissance. Although he borrows eruditely from the sources, he culturally transforms them. Through the founding of...