Dark Days

About the Book

Dewey Roscoe Jones was a pioneering African American journalist. While working for the Chicago Defender, the most widely read black newspaper in the United States, he edited a book review column and a poetry column whose contributors included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Frank Marshall Davis, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Jones personally wrote about fifty reviews, becoming Black Chicago’s premier literary critic and commentator on the Harlem Renaissance. Frequently disappointed by the novels emanating from New York, he endeavored to create his own masterwork of fiction. Dark Days is the fruit of his labors.

Ishmael, the novel’s protagonist, comes to age in Oklahoma, “a wild territory” where former slaves and their offspring vie with former plantation owners and their offspring to make a new life. Theirs is a common legacy of frontier violence and frontier dreams, born in the aftermath of the Civil War, forcible removal of Native Americans, and the 1889 Land Rush. Black Ishmael loves white Denise, and their interlocked fates are the center of the tale. Ishmael’s turbulent journey follows Jones’s own path from Muskogee to Chicago to the trenches of war-torn France.

Dark Days was completed midway between 1930 publication of Langston Hughes’s novel Not Without Laughter and Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940. That chronology situates it in the closing days of Harlem’s Renaissance and on the cusp of Black Chicago’s creative flowering. By recovering his father’s novel, Dewey Roscoe Jones II has performed a service to all readers interested in the trajectory of African American creative expression in the early twentieth century.

Richard A. Courage, Professor of English, Westchester Community College/SUNY; co-author of The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932-1950.

About the Author

The author, Dewey Roscoe Jones, received a BA degree in Journalism form the University of Michigan in 1922. He settled in Chicago and started working for the Chicago Defender, a Black owned and operated newspaper with national circulation. At the Defender he managed a column on Poetry, called Lights and Shadows; he wrote numerous book reviews, and published regular columns on current events and was promoted to City Editor. In 1931 he matriculated at Columbia University and received a MA in journalism in 1932 while continuing to write fo the Chicago Defender. He returned to Chicago and became the Managing Editor. While he printed excerpts form the Novel in his weekly column Pointed Paragraphs in 1935, he did not publish the complete work. He met an untimely death in 1939 without having published the complete Novel. His widow and son preserved the manuscript . His son, Dewey Roscoe Jones II, has completed and edited the maunscript and added an introduction to the book. Dewey Roscoe Jones II received a BA in Liberal Arts from the Unirsity of Chicago, an MA in Spanish Language and Literature from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and a Juris Doctor degree from the Chicago Kent College of Law .