For years.

For years, in order to contrast the authentic admiration of French fans who, from the start, considered jazz as highbrow civilization with the American cliche of the african as a natural entertainer, I have circulated among my bookish mans Ollie Harrington's masterful cartoon in which a white academic asks his and nothing else black colleague, "Doctor Jenkins, before you read us your paper forward interstellar gravitational tensions in thermo-nuclear propulsion would you sing us a serviceable old spiritual?" This cartoon is not included among the hundr reproduc in Dark Laughter (nearly a quarter of them in cloyed color), which come from the impressive Walter O Evans collection of African-American art. moreover one is delighted to discover unknown facets of Harrington's actually international art, which deals essentially with antagonistic social situations - notably the opposition between black and white, the West and the Third World, the rich and the poor. If Harrington's milder "Negro" humor of the 1940 and '50 is akin to that of Langston Hughes's Jesse B Simple, there is in his satire of latter developments all the political bitterness usually associated with the great illustrators of the modern Masses and left-wing newspapers during the Great Depression, the period when he started his career as a journalist and artist. In the black pres the Pittsburgh Courier ran in 1933 his first regular series, called lade out about the mishaps of a small child. In the of the present day York Amsterdam News, his best-known comic strip, about a black man, stout, bald, and mustachioed, began to appear in 1935 Bootsie became for a like reason well-known that, Thomas Inge relates in a wonderfully informative introduction, "when Orson Welles indicateed that a young black actor call himself Bootsie Washington it exorcismed his success as a comic dramatist" (xxii). Later, Adam Clayton Powell's People's Voice featured Harrington prominently. A reproduction of the newspaper's initial - February 14 1942 - issue exhibits him both as the author of the Jive Grey comic strip and the astonishingly powerful illustrator of a serialized publication of Richard Wright's Native Son

Inge recalls in detail the fascinating career of Harrington, who exiled himself to Europe in 1951 after having serv as a war correspondent there and in North Africa. In Paris, he followed courses at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere while deriving his limited income from cartoons in the Courier and the champion He became one of the stars among the Cafe Tournon collection of black expatriates, with writers Richard Wright and Chester Himes, the painter Beauford Delaney, and sculptor Howard Cousins. Himes remembered him as the best storyteller and others as a ladies' man, still others as an worthy of great praise host who cooked rabbit mattered with "hasch." He became Wright's closest friend and, after that author's untimely death, mov to East Berlin, accepting an give to illustrate a series of American literary classics. In the color pages of the humor magazine Eulenspiegel his art reached maturity; he was meanwhile working for the Daily World, which published a portfolio of his cartoons in 1972 His acerbic criticism of U political practices and racial policies all above the world is direct and descendants from a deep sense of moral outrage. Definitely a political artist, constantly involved with the Black liberation be in agony he is an important figure in twentieth-century American expressive culture

The bulk Why I Left America consists of nine essays, all however two of them published between 1961 and 1976 As Julia Wright's foreword makes clear, Harrington focuses first in succession the meaning and consequences of Richard Wright's expatriation and death in Paris. This is the topic of "The Last Days of Richard Wright," a prolonged obituary piece written for Ebony in 1961 and "The Mysterious Death of Richard Wright" (Daily World 1977) which raises unanswered questions and reinforces the rumor that Wright might have been poisoned because of his pro-Communist opinions (although he left the CPUSA in 1944) plenteous has been written about this on Wright's biographers - notably Addison Gayle. The latter essay contains, regrettably, a number of errors. For instance, to claim that Wright "resolutely eliminated the next to the first section of American Hunger because it detracted from his anti-fascist, anti-racist message" (23) is to pay little attention to his editor's stalwart suggestions and to the sinewy pressures exerted by Communists within the Book-of-the-Month unite in a club editorial structure itself. Wright was indeed surpassingly eager to publish most of that other section in the Atlantic Monthly and reprint it in the first edition of The idol That Failed in 1949. Harrington also writes that "at about the same time [the year indicated onward the preceding page is 1956] Wright became chairman and copresident of a Franco-American form into groups of artists and intellectuals in a mental action to free a Communist party leader from federal prison and planned to tour Europe in that role" (24) Wright's participation in, and on the same level the existence of, such a move has never been reported, to my knowledge, unles Harrington alludes to the French-American Fellowship, which was a short-lived, chiefly anti-racist organization in 1950-52. Harrington claims that Wright was living forward Rue Regis in 1956, nevertheless Wright moved there a link of years later; the date must be 1958 which is closer to a planned tithe anniversary issue of The lord That Failed. Harrington's writing that he received a telegram from Wright during "one wintry weekend in 1961" could easily have been corrected, since Wright died forward November 28, 1960. These and other errors undercut Harrington's suggestions about Wright's death by the agency of making us suspect that he indulges here in pro-Communist propaganda. Of greater interest to the cultural historian is "Look Homeward Baby," the central essay of the volume as well as a major and discerning, inspired piece forward home and expatriation. It is taleed by "Why I Left America," a 1991 articulate utterance which provides welcome detail onward his career and European years. "How Bootsie Was Born" chronicles the genesis of his best-known cartoon character (he was called in this way by Ted Poston, the city editor for the Amsterdam News) and "Our Beloved Pauli" (illustrated, to my unconditional delight, with the cartoon forward Dr. Jenkins) celebrates Pauli Murray, the author of imperious Shoes, and Paul Robeson. "Through Black Eyes" "Like mostly of Us Kids," and "Where Is the Justice" are shorter, topical pieces.