Attaway, William (1911–1986), novelist, composer, and scriptwriter. William Attaway was born 19 November 1911, in Greenville, Mississippi, to Florence Parry Attaway, a teacher, and William Alexander Attaway, a physician and founder of the National Negro Insurance Association. When he was five, his family moved to Chicago, taking part in the Great Migration that he later chronicled as a novelist. The family moved to protect the children from the corrosive racial attitudes of the South.
Attaway's early interest in literature was sparked by Langston Hughes's poetry and by his sister who encouraged him to write for her theater groups. He attended the University of Illinois until his father's death, when Attaway left school and traveled west. He lived as a vagabond for two years, working a variety of jobs and writing. In 1933 he returned to Chicago and resumed his schooling, graduating in 1936. Attaway's play Carnival (1935) was produced at the University of Illinois, and in 1936 his short story, “The Tale of the Blackamoor,” was published in Challenge.
Attaway was involved with the Federal Writers’ Project in 1935 and befriended Richard Wright, whom he once invited to speak to the university literary society. Attaway reported that as Wright read “Big Boy Leaves Home,” an unflinching look at the racism and violence that forces one young African American to leave the South, audience members fled, finally leaving only Wright and himself in the room. Attaway understood that the issues he would address in his own fiction might disturb readers, but the event did not dissuade him from providing blunt depictions of racism and struggle.
After graduation, Attaway lived in New York City and held several jobs including labor organizer. While working as an actor, Attaway completed his first novel, written in the tradition of naturalist and proletarian novels of the period. Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939) follows two young white migrant farmworkers, Step and Ed, who travel by rail in the west at the end of the Depression. They befriend a nine-year-old Mexican youth, Hi Boy, whose optimism serves as a contrast to Step's cynicism. While many critics emphasized Attaway's focus on whites, some noted the marginalized status of those characters and the strength of the novel's African American characters.
Blood on the Forge (1941), called by critic Robert Bone the most perceptive novel about the Great Migration, centers on three African American half brothers who escape a lynch mob in 1919 and leave Kentucky for the steel mills of Pennsylvania. Like other literature of the migration, this novel questions the notion of the North as the promised land. While the brothers escape the violence of the South, they soon encounter the violence of northern industrial capitalism. The three are ultimately devastated: Big Mat is killed, Chinatown blinded, and Melody spiritually injured. Many critics compared the novel to Wright's Native Son, especially linking Big Mat with Wright's Bigger Thomas. Attaway's use of language that expresses a sense of the folk idiom has been compared to Zora Neale Hurston's use of African American oral tradition. Ralph Ellison praised the book's examination of transition and conflict but critiqued its omission of characters not destroyed by the transition north, saying that Attaway understood the destruction of folk culture but missed its regeneration in other forms.
While well received by critics, Attaway's books sold poorly, and he wrote no more novels. Although he published the short story “Death of a Rag Doll” in 1947, he turned his creative focus to composing and arranging music (he was especially interested in West Indian music and collaborated with his friend Harry Belafonte). He published two music-oriented books: Calypso Song Book (1957) and Hear America Singing (1967). Attaway also explored other media, writing scripts for radio, television, and film. In 1966, he wrote the script for One Hundred Years of Laughter, a television special on African American humor. He wrote a screenplay adaptation of The Man, Irving Wallace's novel about the first African American president. Attaway's version, foregrounding racial conflict and emphasizing African American voices, was ultimately rejected by the producers.
Attaway had some involvement in the civil rights movement, including the 1965 voting rights march to Selma, Alabama. He lived in Barbados for eleven years, with his wife and two children. His last years were spent in California, where he worked on the script for The Atlanta Child Murders (1985). He died in Los Angeles in 1986.
As one of the first African American novelists to focus on the subject, Attaway is primarily known for his contribution to the literature of the Great Migration. He vividly portrayed the causes and often devastating consequences of that exodus. While refusing to sentimentalize, he wrote with compassion and rich detail about working-class characters of different races and their various, usually tragic, struggles.
Bibliography
- Ralph Ellison, “Transition,”
Negro Quarterly 1 (Spring 1942): 87–92. - Edward Margolies, “Migration: William Attaway and Blood on the Forge” in Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors, 1968, pp. 47–64.
- Richard Yarborough, afterword in Blood on on the Forge, 1941; rpt. 1987.
- Samuel Garren, “‘He Had passion’: William Attaway's Screenplay Drafts of Irving Wallace's The Man,” CLA Journal 37 (Mar. 1994): 245–260
Christina Accomando
