Writing the history of African American literature in the 1930s necessitates reconsidering issues that emanated from the 1920s, with a view toward showing how they underwent change in the 1930s. Four overlapping foci demonstrate how change, in these two eras, was less disjunctive than evolutionary: (1) a shift in the meaning of racial uplift, (2) quest for racial authenticity, (3) efforts to increase cultural competence, and (4) the writing of literary history. By the mid-1920s, this history can be gleaned, at least initially, in the adult education movement, which had come to define its mission as not simply acquiring knowledge but applying it to problem-solving in real-life situations. Organizations like the American Association for Adult Education (AADE), the Carnegie Foundation, and the Julius Rosenwald Fund provided financial support for education that reconciled intergroup conflicts, inequities, and the marginalization of citizens. Adult education in the 1930s slowly gave way to a list of competing literary critical approaches that revised the earlier conversation taking place about the nature and purpose of performing African American literary history.

It took some time for Mark Twain to be recognized as anything more than just another of the humorists of his time, although from the start, there were critics who recognized that he contained depth and substance that would make him last longer than his ephemeral comic peers. Significantly, William Dean Howells, writing in the influential Atlantic, saw in Twain an important writer to be reckoned with. The public were ahead of most critics in their appreciation of his work, and their letters to him bear witness to his power as a writer. In the early twentieth century, H. L. Mencken was a champion of Twain, although Twain received the same kind of backlash Howells received at the hands of a younger generation, notably Van Wyck Brooks, whose 1920 book The Ordeal of Mark Twain used crude Freudianism to argue that Twain was a comic genius who was censored and emasculated by William Dean Howells and by Twain’s wife. In 1932, Bernard De Voto answered Brooks in Mark Twain’s America, arguing for Twain’s artistry and creative vitality. In many ways, their argument set the tone for Twain criticism, especially in the decades that followed, but continuing even today. In the 1940s and 1950s, Twain’s critical reputation rose, with a number of important critics and scholars seeing in him greatness, elevating Mark Twain to the first rank of American writers.