Unfinished Masterpiece: The Harlem Renaissance Fiction of Anita Scott Coleman [Paperback]

Laurie Champion (Editor), Bruce A. Glasrud (Editor), Cary D. Wintz (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 2008

Though Anita Scott Coleman was born in Mexico and reared in New Mexico, her stories appeared frequently in The Crisis and other leading journals of the Harlem Renaissance. Reflecting and illuminating the movement’s major themes, her often award-winning stories, delicate and understated, offer subtle commentary on the status of black women, their role in black society, and the position of African Americans in an overwhelmingly white society. As a young woman in New Mexico, Anita Scott graduated from New Mexico Teachers College and enjoyed a brief teaching career until she married. Later she moved to California, where despite her distance from Harlem she wrote her last nine published stories, polished examples of the Renaissance’s finest short fiction, including “Unfinished Masterpieces.” As one by one the journals of the Harlem Renaissance ceased publication, Coleman’s career itself remained regrettably unfinished. By 1960, when she died at age seventy, the literary legacy of this masterful southwestern storyteller was forgotten. What Champion and Glasrud have recovered in this collection is more than Coleman’s complete collected short fiction. It is a road map of African American life in the Southwest and West during the movement’s glory days, etching not only indelible glimpses of character and culture but also the farthest reaching evidence of the Harlem Renaissance’s success in sharing ideals and goals across a nation.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Coleman (1890–1960) was a black woman born in Mexico and raised in the American Southwest. Her connection to the Harlem Renaissance is mostly temporal, but that doesn't detract from this book's appeal. The 21 short stories it gathers, arranged chronologically, grow more somber and complex over time. Rich Man, Poor Man— features a white rancher's daughter falling for a black chauffeur: it's typical of the early group (published 1919–1922) in its domestic plot, happy ending and tangential treatment of race. The tenor shifts in the 10 stories of 1926–1933: the women are fallen or falling; secrets (a slave past, passing) tumble out; an antiblack riot erupts at the center of The Brat. Things get very ominous in Cross Crossings Cautiously, when a five-year-old white girl asks a black man to the circus, and off they go. Coleman's perspective extends and challenges conventional notions about the settings, characters and themes of early 20th-century African-American fiction. Her work is entertaining for the general reader and historically significant for the scholar. (May)
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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press (May 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0896726290
• ISBN-13: 978-0896726291
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,594,932 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)