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Reflecting on his encounters with Chicago school sociology, Richard Wright commented,
I did not know what my story was, and it was not until I stumbled upon science that I discovered some of the meanings of the environment that battered and taunted me ... I found that sincere art and honest science were not far apart, that each could enrich the other.
Cynthia Tolentino's America's Experts: Race and the Fictions of Sociology adds to a growing body of American studies scholarship that examines why sociology held such fascination for mid-twentieth-century writers of color such as Wright. This development is welcome, as students of American studies have too often ignored the social sciences. A slim volume, America's Experts offers four case studies on the relationship between literature, race and sociology. These focus on Wright's Native Son, Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma, Carlos Bulosan's America is the Heart, and Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter.
America's Experts is at its best when...