SOURCE: Fleming, Robert E. “Overshadowed by Richard Wright: Three Black Chicago Novelists.” Negro American Literature Forum 7, no. 3 (fall 1973): 75-9.

In the following essay, Fleming writes about the work of Waters E. Turpin, Alden Bland, and Frank London Brown, three black novelists who, according to Fleming have written significant works about Chicago.

Inevitably, when one thinks of the black writer's depiction of American city life, he is likely to think first of Richard Wright's Chicago—the cold, snowy city through which Bigger Thomas flees in Native Son, the city from which Cross Damon escapes in The Outsider, the frustrating home of Jake Jackson in Wright's posthumous novel Lawd Today. However, the prominence of Wright has caused several other significant realistic treatments of black Chicago to be overlooked. Three novelists whose work has been largely ignored, even by specialists in black literature, are Waters E. Turpin, Alden Bland, and Frank...