James Weldon Johnson

Marguerite Johnson had already become a voracious reader, both of Black writers and of canonical dead white males. Shakespeare , she wrote later, was my first white love. She also enjoyed and respected...

When at seven she moved from Stamps to St Louis and attended Toussaint L'Ouverture High School, Marguerite found the teachers more formal but the students comparatively backward. In a year there she felt she learned...

UM started writing an autobiography, then entitled Autobiography of a Black Girl, by the age of twenty-five. Living in London in 1935, she retitled the manuscript Autobiography of a Brown Girl. Victor Gollancz

In the year leading up to this publication, UM was reading (mostly male) African-American writers—Booker T. Washington , James Weldon Johnson , and W. E. B. Du Bois—and taking an intense interest in...

Reviewers of GS saw this work as embodying a new naturalism.H. G. Wells read Three Lives with deepening pleasure & admiration, and William James wrote to tell her that it was...