In 1935 he returned to Chicago and co-authored the Federal Writers’ Project Guide for Illinois. He spent several years traveling and working odd jobs. Not only was he moved, but upon discovering that Langston Hughes was a black poet, he was inspired to apply himself academically and excel throughout the rest of his high school career.Īttaway attended college briefly but was forced to withdraw due to his father’s death. According to various sources, his life changed when he read a poem by Langston Hughes in English class.

He attended a vocational high school and was set on becoming an auto mechanic. As part of the northward flow during the great migration, his family moved from Mississippi to Chicago when he was six years old to find opportunities in the city and escape the segregated South.Īttaway had little interest in academics as a child.

Attaway, a physician, and Florence Parry Attaway, a teacher. He was born in Mississippi in 1911 to William S. The trajectory of the novel mirrors Attaway’s own life and migration. Exemplifying a common pattern of movement by many black Americans in the 1920s and 1930sknown as the ‘Great Migration,’ the Moss brothers arrive to work in the steel mills in the north, only to discover inequality in a different context in their new life. It is an indispensable account of a major turning point in black history, as well as a triumph of individual style, charged with the concentrated power and poignance of the blues.William Attaway was most well-known for the novel, Blood on the Forge, a story of three brothers who escape sharecropping life in the south to migrate north and find a new life of freedom in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Keenly sensitive to character, prophetic in its depiction of environmental degradation and globalized labor, Attaway's novel is an unprecedented confrontation with the realities of American life, offering an apocalyptic vision of the melting pot not as an icon of hope but as an instrument of destruction.īlood on the Forge was first published in 1941, when it attracted the admiring attention of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Delivered by day into the searing inferno of the steel mills, by night they encounter a world of surreal devastation, crowded with dogfighters, whores, cripples, strikers, and scabs. This brutally gripping novel about the African-American Great Migration follows the three Moss brothers, who flee the rural South to work in industries up North. Praised by both Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, this classic of Black literature is a brutal depiction of the Great Migration from the Jim Crow South

Blood on the forge by william attaway