Rhozier Brown - DC Noir 2 - The Classics

Ross Thomas(1926–1995) worked for over twenty years as a reporter, foreign correspondent, and political strategist. He turned to writing at the age of forty and produced his first novel, The Cold War Swap (1967), which won an Edgar Award, in just six weeks. Writing twenty-five novels over the course of his twenty-nine year career, often under the pseudonym Oliver Bleeck, Thomas’s works include Chinaman’s Chance (1978), Out on the Rim (1987), and Voodoo Ltd . (1992). In 2002, he received the first Gumshoe Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Jean Toomer(1894–1967) was born Nathan Pinchback Toomer in Washington, D.C. An African American whose maternal grandparents both had Caucasian fathers, he resisted racial classification even from childhood, switching between an all-black school in D.C. to an all-white school in New Rochelle, New York, then back again. Although he studied at the University of Wisconsin, the Massachusetts College of Agriculture, the American College of Physical Training in Chicago, City College in New York, and New York University, he never received a degree. Among his most prominent works, Cane (1923) is considered to be a crucial text of the Harlem Renaissance and the Lost Generation; the novel explores the societal position of African Americans in the South during the early 1900s.

Richard Wright(1908–1960) was born to a sharecropper and a school teacher in Mississippi. He was the author of several novels, short stories, and nonfiction works that are among the most powerful and controversial pieces of American writing. A major participant in the Harlem Renaissance, Wright helped redefine race relations in the twentieth century. His first story, “The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre,” was published in 1924 in the Southern Register. Wrights other works include Uncle Toms Children (1938), Native Son (1940), Black Boy (1945), The Outsider (1953), Eight Men (1961), and Haiku: This Other World (1998). In 1940, Native Son became the first national best seller by a black writer in American history.