Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press. By Melba Joyce Boyd. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. xiv, 385 pp. $29.50, ISBN 0-231-13026-0.)

Extract

Detroit's Broadside Press was the most influential African American literary publisher of the 1960s and 1970s—and arguably the most important U.S. small press ever. Broadside put out 81 books, including 74 poetry titles, from 1966 to 1975, containing the work of nearly two hundred African American poets and critics. As Melba Joyce Boyd points out in this fascinating study of the press and its founder, the poet Dudley Randall, this was more than twice the number of poetry titles by black authors brought out by all publishers in the United States from 1945 to 1965—few of which had the national distribution of those produced by Broadside, which printed more than five hundred thousand books during its heyday. Broadside published the work of established older black writers, such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, and Margaret Walker, and of younger and then relatively unknown poets, such as Haki Madhubuti, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and Etheridge Knight. While Broadside was unquestionably the premier press of the black arts movement, it issued books and broadsides by older and younger writers not often associated with the movement, such as Robert Hayden and Audre Lorde. Randall's efforts at Broadside, initially run out of his house and financed largely by his salary as a librarian, inspired the creation of like institutions, notably Third World Press in Chicago and Lotus Press in Detroit. As a result of these efforts and inspirations, the Midwest became a center of independent African American publishing unparalleled before or since.