Livin' the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet

Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography

by Frank Marshall Davis, John Edgar Tidwell

Frank Marshall Davis was a prominent poet, journalist, jazz critic, and civil rights activist on the Chicago and Atlanta scene from the 1920s through 1940s. He was an intimate of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright and an influential editor at the Chicago Evening Bulletin , the Chicago Whip , the Chicago Star , and the Atlanta World . He renounced his writing career in 1948 and moved to Hawaii, forgotten until the Black Arts Movement rediscovered him in the 1960s.

Because of his early self-exile from the literary limelight, Davis's life and work have been shrouded in mystery. Livin' the Blues offers us a chance to rediscover this talented poet and writer and stands as an important example of black autobiography, similar in form, style, and message to those of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright.

"Both a social commentary and intellectual exploration into African American life in the twentieth century."—Charles Vincent, Atlanta History

408 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 1992

Reviews

[Tim Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating book…Davis began his dual career as an editor of Afro-American newspapers and one of America’s earliest published black poets before talkies, at the beginning of the north’s infatuation with jazz, through World Wars and Joe McCarthy, up into the Black Power movement of the late 60s-early 70s. A “man of his time”, Davis also drops obvious bombs of chauvinism and homophobia, but this is a fascinating look at several eras through the eyes of a trained, black observer.