SOURCE: Bogardus, R. F. “Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends: An Early Black Novelist's Venture Into Realism.” Studies in Black Literature 5, no. 2 (summer 1974): 15-20.

In the following essay, Bogardus maintains that Webb's The Garies and Their Friends transcends popular nineteenth-century melodramatic literary conventions to become a sophisticated literary exercise in social realism.

In The Negro Novel in America, Robert A. Bone asserts that the black American writer remained tied to romanticism until the 1920's.¹ That view is largely true and, as such, only partly misleading. But Bone's opinion that Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends² is exclusively a Negro shopkeeper's melodrama is not merely misleading, it is wrongheaded.³ On the contrary, a sensitive reading of Webb's novel within the context of nineteenth century American literature proves it to be far more than that: it is a transitional work which broke with a corrupted romantic...