SOURCE: "Novels of the Talented Tenth," in The Negro Novel in America, Revised Edition, Yale University Press, 1965, pp. 29-50.

In the following excerpt, Bone looks at Griggs's novels within the framework of African-American political conditions at the time of their writing.

Griggs was a prominent Baptist minister and a popular lecturer on the race problem. Having written five novels in the space of ten years (1899 to 1908), he organized his own publishing company in Nashville, Tenn., to promote their sale and distribution. The novels are badly written and tractarian in the extreme, but Griggs' very militancy represents something of a culmination. This militancy deserves closer examination, however, if only because of current misconceptions regarding it. Hugh Gloster has written extensively of Griggs, both in an article in Phylon¹ and in Negro Voices in American Fiction. He has treated Griggs as a political thinker of some stature whose views on...