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“‘Blue is the color of a flame at its hottest point,’ McCarthy reminds us, ‘but also its most focused.’ The same is true of this book. Over the course of five breathtaking, carefully argued chapters, McCarthy rereads canonical writers as well as less familiar ones, inscribing authors such as Vincent O. Carter and Paule Marshall as key figures in the Black literary tradition. These writers’ retreat to a physical and metaphorical underground was not a retreat from politics, according to McCarthy, but rather a voyage into the interior where a new, existential vantage point on political life and futurity becomes possible. In his lucid and engaging style, McCarthy combines subtle historicism with close reading and interdisciplinary insight. The result is a pathbreaking study—and robust defense—of African American literature of the era.” * Vaughn Rasberry, Stanford University *

“‘Blue is the color of a flame at its hottest point,’ McCarthy reminds us, ‘but also its most focused.’ The same is true of this book. Over the course of five breathtaking, carefully argued chapters, McCarthy rereads canonical writers as well as less familiar ones, inscribing authors such as Vincent O. Carter and Paule Marshall as key figures in the black literary tradition. These writers’ retreat to a physical and metaphorical underground was not a retreat from politics, according to McCarthy, but rather a voyage into the interior where a new, existential vantage point on political life and futurity becomes possible. In his lucid and engaging style, McCarthy combines subtle historicism with close reading and interdisciplinary insight. The result is a pathbreaking study—and robust defense—of African American literature of the era.” * Vaughn Rasberry, Stanford University * “McCarthy reckons with a generation of black writers just getting started in the 1950s who refused the partisan pressures of their Cold War context. James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Aimé Cesaire, and others, made an audacious retreat into the subtleties of the black interior, writing for a future they had no assurance would ever come. Considering the recent ‘return of the prophet’ Baldwin after decades of critical neglect, McCarthy’s claim seems almost obvious—if it weren’t for the fact that, before The Blue Period, we hadn’t seen it. The Blue Period demonstrates what a clear-eyed and compelling literary history can do for us today—less to explain how readers might have understood the work at the time, more to offer access into what Reinhart Kosselleck called ‘futures past.’” * Stephen Best, University of California, Berkeley *

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Jesse McCarthy is assistant professor of English and African and African American studies at Harvard University. He is the editor of the Norton Library edition of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and the first volume of Minor Notes, an anthology of African American poetry. He is also the author of Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? Essays, winner of the 2022 Whiting Award for Non-Fiction, and the novel The Fugitivities.

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