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Blood on the forge by william attaway5/22/2023 He died in Los Angeles while working on a script. Attaway moved to New York, published his first novel, 'Let Me Breathe Thunder' (1939), the story of two white vagrants traveling with a young Mexican boy, and quickly followed it with 'Blood on the Forge' (1941), about the fate of three African-American brothers in the Great Migration to the North.Īttaway never produced another novel, but went on to prosper as a writer of radio and television scripts, screenplays, and numerous songs, including the “Banana Boat Song (Day-O),” which was a hit for his friend Harry Belafonte.Ī resident for many years of Barbados, Attaway returned to the United States toward the end of his life. He then worked variously as a seaman, a salesman, a union organizer, and as part of the Federal Writers’ Project, where he made friends with Richard Wright. Rebelling against his middle-class origins, Attaway dropped out of the University of Illinois and spent some time as a hobo before returning to complete his college degree in 1936. William Attaway (1911–1986) was born in Mississippi, the son of a physician who moved his family to Chicago to escape the segregated South.Īttaway was an indifferent student in high school, but after hearing a Langston Hughes poem read in class and discovering that Hughes was black, he was inspired with an urgent ambition to write.
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