An Anthology of American Negro Literature

📅 1929 ✏️ V. F. Calverton 📖 Modern Library (Random House)

African AmericanHarlem RenaissanceCanon-FormationModern Library20th Century

An Anthology of American Negro Literature (1929), edited by Marxist literary critic V. F. Calverton for the Modern Library series, was an early landmark of Black American literary canon-formation, bringing together poetry, fiction, essays, and spirituals by African American writers at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. It was the first anthology of Black American literature to be issued by a major mainstream publisher.

Overview

Published in 1929 by Modern Library, the prestigious reprint series of Random House, An Anthology of American Negro Literature was edited by V. F. Calverton (born George Goetz), a white Marxist literary critic and editor of the leftist journal The Modern Quarterly. Despite its editor's identity as an outsider to Black culture, the anthology was a pioneering effort to compile a representative body of African American writing for a national audience at a moment when Black literary achievement was becoming impossible for mainstream American culture to ignore.

Scope and Contents

The anthology collected poetry, fiction, essays, drama, and spirituals by African American writers, ranging from the post-Civil War generation through the emerging figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Poetic selections included work by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and James Weldon Johnson. The poetry was presented alongside prose selections, essays on Black culture and politics, and a substantial selection of traditional African American spirituals — the first time a mainstream anthology had presented these as literature rather than folklore or ethnography.

Editorial Approach

Calverton's introduction framed Black American literature through a sociological and Marxist lens, arguing that the literature of an oppressed group revealed truths about American society that its mainstream literature could not. This political framing distinguished the anthology from the more purely aesthetic approaches taken by Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925) and James Weldon Johnson's The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922). Calverton also made the unconventional choice to include white-authored essays about Black culture alongside Black-authored texts, a decision that drew criticism then and later.

Historical Significance

The anthology's publication by Modern Library — the leading mass-market series for "great books" in America — was itself significant. It signalled that Black American literature had achieved sufficient recognition to warrant inclusion in a series that otherwise featured Shakespeare, Dante, Plato, and Thomas Hardy. This mainstream institutional imprimatur made the anthology an important predecessor to the systematic recovery and canonization of African American literature that would accelerate in subsequent decades.

Criticism

Calverton's status as a white editor of a Black literary anthology was controversial in its own time and remains contested. Some critics argued that his Marxist frame distorted the literature's actual concerns; others noted that the editorial authority over Black literary canon-formation remained, once again, in white hands. The anthology has been largely superseded by more comprehensive and community-rooted collections such as the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997), but its place as a pioneering institutional effort remains historically significant.

Related Anthologies

The New Negro: An Interpretation, The Book of American Negro Poetry

Frequently Asked Questions

What is An Anthology of American Negro Literature?

An Anthology of American Negro Literature (1929), edited by V. F. Calverton and published by Modern Library, was an early landmark collection of African American poetry, fiction, essays, and spirituals, issued by a major mainstream publisher at the height of the Harlem Renaissance.

Why is this anthology significant for poetry anthologies specifically?

It was one of the first mainstream anthologies to canonize Harlem Renaissance poets — Hughes, Cullen, McKay, Toomer — alongside earlier poets like Dunbar within a national literary series, marking the moment Black poetry achieved institutional recognition beyond specialized or community publications.

Who was V. F. Calverton?

V. F. Calverton (born George Goetz, 1900–1940) was a white Marxist literary critic and editor who compiled this anthology for Modern Library. His identity as a white editor of Black literature drew criticism then and remains contested.

Last updated: 2026-07-01