This title addresses the political and aesthetic evolution of African American literature and its authors during the Cold War, an era McCarthy calls ‘the Blue Period.’ In the years after World War II, to be a Black writer was to face a stark predicament. The contest between the Soviet Union and the United States was a global one – an ideological battle that dominated almost every aspect of the cultural agenda. On the one hand was the Soviet Union, espousing revolutionary communism that promised egalitarianism while being hostile to conceptions of personal freedom. On the other hand was the United States, a country steeped in racial prejudice and the policies of Jim Crow. Black writers of this time were equally alienated from the left and the right, Jesse McCarthy argues, and they channeled that alienation into remarkable experiments in literary form.