In “The Blue Period,” Jesse McCarthy zooms in on Black authors who lived and wrote between 1945 and 1965. During these decades, roughly the first half of the Cold War, most of the world sided with either America or the Soviet Union. But many Black Americans felt torn. “What is so distinctive, compelling, and politically potent about black writing from this era,” McCarthy writes, “is its dissent from both of the hegemonic Cold War ideological blocks.” Instead of turning toward Washington or Moscow, Black authors turned inward. Alongside Black painters and Black musicians, they produced ambiguous and emotional art that McCarthy calls “blue.”
It’s an invigorating modern window into well-known writers like Ralph Ellison and Gwendolyn Brooks, and it offers a chance to rediscover forgotten figures like Vincent O. Carter. It’s also a reminder that in our own period — one marked by distraction and information and a reflexive obsession with the present — the quaint act of thinking historically, of thinking periodically, remains valuable, even radical.
Thanks to some wonderful authors and some diligent academics, current Black literature now feels prosperous with periodization. There’s Toni Morrison, who looms as a period unto herself. There are current writers like Jesmyn Ward and Colson Whitehead, who extend and revise Morrison’s historical approach. Moving backward, there’s the Black Arts Movement, with writers like Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka, and the Harlem Renaissance, with writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.
But what about the gap between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement? McCarthy found himself pondering those missing decades one day when he was a graduate student at Princeton, browsing the library shelves.
It started when McCarthy pulled down a copy of Vincent O. Carter’s undiscovered and experimental memoir “The Bern Book,” a striking volume with its cover illustration of a single piercing eye. “I was immediately intrigued,” McCarthy says.
“The Blue Period” sketches this framework, often through the words of the authors themselves. In 1948, soon after he’d emigrated to Paris, Richard Wright published an essay on the front page of a French newspaper. “My body was born in America,” Wright wrote. “My heart was born in Russia; and today I stand contritely ashamed between my two parent countries.”
Richard Wright in 1946.Fred Stein Archive/Getty Images
Many Black intellectuals shared Wright’s alienation. On one side, there was the version of communism that had once energized them — but also Stalin and his brutal assault on freedom. On the other side, there was America and its avowed liberalism — but also the reality lived by so many Black people of Jim Crow and its brutal assault on freedom.
The weapon many writers chose was a “blue” style, an adjective McCarthy borrows from Miles Davis and several of his 1950s albums, including “Kind of Blue.” “Davis would turn his back to the audience when he performed,” McCarthy says. Then he would play music that was intense, meditative, and inwardly focused — music that was reserved but still fiery.
“When I think of Black life in the 1950s,” McCarthy says, “it has this kind of sound.”
Once McCarthy understood the political active and the aesthetic response to it, he began to see examples everywhere. Take Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” Critics have often read the novel as Ellison’s turn from communism toward liberalism. But McCarthy believes this reading is too elementary. “Ellison sees Black people being instrumentalized by both sides,” he says. “Invisible Man” doesn’t end with the main character choosing a team. It ends with him retreating to his books and jazz records — with him turning his back to the audience and adopting a blue style.
One benefit of a literary period is that it can cast major figures in a fresh delicate. Another is that it can elevate minor figures. Vincent O. Carter is a good example. Although he wrote “The Bern Book” near the start of the blue period, in the ’50s, he couldn’t find a publisher until 1973. “By then it was the height of the Black Arts Movement,” McCarthy says, referring to the decade-long period of overtly political Black writing. “No one wanted this kind of book from a Black writer.” “The Bern Book” describes leaving America and ultimately settling in rural Switzerland. “Carter meditates on what Blackness means,” McCarthy says, “especially in the heart of Europe.” For his next book, “Such Sweet Thunder,” a novel centered on a Black working-class neighborhood that will be erased by an Eisenhower interstate, Carter couldn’t find any publisher at all. It appeared in 2003, two decades after his death.
By restoring both Carter titles to the 1950s, when they were largely written, McCarthy can argue for their importance and illuminate their themes.
McCarthy hopes literary connections like these, so persuasively laid out in “The Blue Period,” will give scholars and students modern approaches to Black writers of the 1950s and 1960s. At Harvard, he wants to teach a class that will focus on a number of blue texts. “If you’re teaching a whole class instead of a survey,” he says, “then in addition to Baldwin and Ellison you can assign, say, ‘Brown Girl, Brownstones’” — a 1959 novel by Paule Marshall about a family of immigrants with a fierce emotional life. Bookworms can do the same thing at home, pairing Marshall with Gwendolyn Brooks or Carter with Baldwin.
In addition to making a case for the blue period, McCarthy wants to advocate for a certain style of reading and thinking. “My students are extremely bright,” he says. “In many ways they know more than I did when I was in college, and if they don’t know something, they can look it up.” But sometimes he wonders if this information has become not just a crutch but an obstacle. “They don’t always know where all of this information fits in an actual trajectory,” he says. “They struggle to think historically.”
Thinking historically matters for any subject, but it especially matters for someone trying to understand the Black experience in America. As McCarthy writes in his book, “mores and political attitudes, fashion and taste, idiom and vocabulary — most notoriously the very words black people use to describe themselves — what it means to and how it feels to be black in the modern world have swung wildly.”
The swings and breaks of the past often provide its most revealing moments — but also the ones that are easiest to misinterpret or simply to forget. This is where thinking periodically can aid.
Craig Fehrman is a journalist and historian. He is at work on a revisionist history of the Lewis and Clark expedition for Simon & Schuster.
