Content area
Full Text
James Weldon Johnson. The Selected Writings of James We/don Johnson, Volume I: The New York Age Editorials (1914-1923). Ed. with an intro. by Sondra Kathryn Wilson. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. 324 pp. $45.00.
-. The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson, Volume II: Social, Political, and Literary Essays. Ed. with an intro. by Sondra Kathryn Wilson. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. 473 pp. $49.95.
James Weldon Johnson's writings dominated the 1920s as did those of no other African American writer with the possible exception of W. E. B. Du Bois. As leader of the NAACP, former State Department envoy to foreign lands, novelist, and poet, Johnson was a touchstone to the thinking of literary Black America during the decade of the Harlem Renaissance. Sondra Kathryn Wilson's twovolume edition The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson documents Johnson's rise to that position and shows what Johnson wrote once he had achieved his prominent position. The collection makes available texts that were previously difficult to access and includes Johnson's most familiar work, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.
In 1914, when Johnson returned from his diplomatic posts as consul in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, and Corinto, Nicaragua, he needed both a full-time job to support himself and his wife, Grace Nail Johnson, and a power base from which to launch a further literary and political career. (His reputation in New York at this point was most closely tied to his successes as a writer of musical comedy.) He found the power base, if not exactly the...