“‘Blue is the color of a flame at its hottest point,’ McCarthy reminds us, ‘but also its most focused.’ The same is true of this book. Over the course of five breathtaking, carefully argued chapters, McCarthy rereads canonical writers as well as less familiar ones, inscribing authors such as Vincent O. Carter and Paule Marshall as key figures in the black literary tradition. These writers’ retreat to a physical and metaphorical underground was not a retreat from politics, according to McCarthy, but rather a voyage into the interior where a new, existential vantage point on political life and futurity becomes possible. In his lucid and engaging style, McCarthy combines subtle historicism with close reading and interdisciplinary insight. The result is a pathbreaking study—and robust defense—of African American literature of the era.”

Vaughn Rasberry, Stanford University

“McCarthy reckons with a generation of black writers just getting started in the 1950s who refused the partisan pressures of their Cold War context. James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Aimé Cesaire, and others, made an audacious retreat into the subtleties of the black interior, writing for a future they had no assurance would ever come. Considering the recent ‘return of the prophet’ Baldwin after decades of critical neglect, McCarthy’s claim seems almost obvious—if it weren’t for the fact that, before The Blue Period, we hadn’t seen it. The Blue Period demonstrates what a clear-eyed and compelling literary history can do for us today—less to explain how readers might have understood the work at the time, more to offer access into what Reinhart Kosselleck called ‘futures past.’”

Stephen Best, University of California, Berkeley

"[McCarthy] encourages his readers to reimagine the geographical, political, and temporal scope of midcentury Black writers through the lens of a famous traditional color in Black music, 'the blue.' Critics, in his estimation, have lost sight of the 'strategic retreat' that he identifies across a variety of Black authors writing between 1945–1965. . . He untethers 'Blue Period' figures like James Baldwin, Paule Marshall, and Richard Wright from the routine questions about their affiliations with communism or liberalism, claiming that this focus on whether or not these Black writers’ works were either politically engaging or reactionary prevents critics from reimagining the 'radical political intent' demonstrated by Black writers of this era. . . . McCarthy collects all these writers as part of his jazz room that pulsates with underground rhythms. The Blue Period overall is outstanding, masterfully crafted, brilliantly written, and impeccably researched."

Critical Inquiry

"In The Blue Period, Jesse McCarthy zooms in on Black authors who lived and wrote between 1945 and 1965 . . . Alongside Black painters and Black musicians, they produced ambiguous and emotional art that McCarthy calls 'blue.' It’s an exciting new window into well-known writers like Ralph Ellison and Gwendolyn Brooks, and it offers a chance to rediscover forgotten figures like Vincent O. Carter. It’s also a reminder that in our own period —one marked by distraction and information and a reflexive obsession with the present—the quaint act of thinking historically, of thinking periodically, remains valuable, even radical."

The Boston Globe