Class, Culture, and Coming of Age in Alice Browning’s Chicago Girl

Abstract

Among the many contributors to Chicago’s Black Renaissance, a creative movement which reached its height during the 1930s and ’40s, was Alice Browning, an African American educator, publisher, and writer. Best known as the coeditor of Negro Story, a short-lived but influential Black literary magazine, Browning was also a frustrated novelist who worked on an unpublished manuscript titled Chicago Girl for much of her adult life. A flawed but fascinating examination of race, sex, and class in the modern American city, Chicago Girl helps to deepen our understanding of Chicago’s Black Renaissance and the often unrealized ambitions of aspiring Black writers.