Elizabeth McHenry’s To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice and African American Authorship was the first book I read after I submitted my PhD thesis.Footnote ¹ It had been sitting on my shelf for several months but I could tell that, during my final revisions, opening the book would open up too many new paths that I wouldn’t have time to follow. I was right. At this key juncture in my career, when one project was ending and question marks were appearing in my head about what was next for me, To Make Negro Literature crystallized exactly who I want to be as a researcher and the stories I would like to tell with my work. Although the book focusses on a period slightly before that of my own research and on authors who were broadly unfamiliar to me, McHenry’s combination of archival research and close reading offers a model for the methodology I hope to achieve.

Beginning with an assessment of W. E. B. Du Bois’s short-lived journal Moon Illustrated Weekly (1905–6), McHenry argues that critics who position the Moon as a precursor to Du Bois’s following venture, the far more successful Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, obscure the particularities of Du Bois’s failure to his career. This brief window into an unexplored moment in the life of one of the most prominent African American intellectuals reveals McHenry’s main interest in the book, to centre literary projects that have been dismissed or ignored by history and projects that outright failed. As she argues in her introduction, “Literary history seldom privileges that which is unsuccessful, whether in terms of writers and texts never recognized by publication, or projects that remained incomplete or unfulfilled. But these writers, texts, and projects are no less a part of literary history” (5). In particular, by remembering African American literary failures, in a society where white people deemed Black culture to be incompatible with intellectual life, we can see how remarkable the continued endeavours of these authors were.

McHenry’s focus on a short window of time, from around 1890 to 1910, a period that is often subsumed into either the early period of Reconstruction or into an extended understanding of the Harlem Renaissance, resists attempts to stretch out literary movements into “the long nineteenth century” or “modernism”. She argues instead for specificity, and particularly a recovery of the time Rayford Logan terms the “nadir” of race relations in the US.Footnote ² McHenry’s interest is in a moment of time “when African American literature doesn’t cohere” (11, original emphasis) and how this coherence was achieved.

Across four chapters, McHenry focusses on forms of literary production that are often disregarded: books sold by subscription, reference works, works that remained unpublished. The key focus of the book’s first half is on literary communities and collaboration. The first chapter, on what McHenry terms “racial schoolbooks,” explores how volumes of writing by various Black authors were compiled and curated to be circulated to educate young African Americans in the South and the Midwest. “Thinking Bibliographically,” the book’s second chapter, explores lists of works of African American literature that were used to make Black print cultures visible and useable. These forms of writing, often deemed functional and thereby perfunctory, were essential to making the concept of “Negro literature” comprehensible.

The third and fourth chapters of To Make Negro Literature turn to forms of authorship that have been unrecognized by history. The fact that T. Thomas Fortune wrote many of the works published under Booker T. Washington’s name is relatively well known. What McHenry does in her chapter, though, is to demonstrate how Fortune’s project was to centre authorship and print within Black leadership. At the same time, she focusses on how Fortune’s own ambitions of authorship were never fulfilled. This aspect of literary failure continues into the final, and most accomplished, chapter, which explores the case of Mary Church Terrell. While Terrell had success as a journalist and activist in early twentieth-century America, McHenry uncovers her desire to publish short stories: Terrell’s archives at the Library of Congress are full not only of these stories but also of dozens of rejection letters from literary magazines. McHenry argues that Terrell used this rejection as a form of protest against a publishing industry that lacked interest in creative works by African American authors.

The purpose of each chapter is not to reclaim undiscovered great works of literature or even to encourage wider criticism on its subject. Rather, the book’s purpose is to show what a centring of literary failure can tell us about how African American literary culture developed, and from where both Black readers and writers emerged. We see the obstacles that African American authors faced in attempting to establish literary careers but also how these obstacles were manoeuvred.

Both To Make Negro Literature and McHenry’s previous book, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (2002), work to excavate Black literary histories that have been neglected. More than this, though, through her focus on forms of literature which are often excluded from common definitions of literature – the unpublished, the factual, the ghostwritten – McHenry expands our understanding of literary studies, opening up innumerable avenues of research. In its narrow focus and close attention to its subjects, To Make Negro Literature is as generous as it is rigorous, and will shape many future scholars’ research, including my own.

In recent years, African American literary studies has taken an archival turn, both with the rediscoveries of novels like Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille and in critical writing that centres the archive, including Jean-Christophe Cloutier’s Shadow Archives and, most recently, Laura Helton’s Scattered and Fugitive Things.Footnote ³ The possibilities of discovery in African American literature feel endless. What McHenry shows us, however, is that we cannot ignore the unfinished or the unsuccessful in our understanding of Black cultural history. As I move forward into the next stage of my research career, I, too, hope to find threads that are impossible to follow, to centre findings that do not seem to add to much, or, as McHenry puts it, “to contribute important fragments to the literary history that is our collective responsibility to reconstruct” (238).