Eugene Gordon (writer)

Eugene Gordon (1891–1972) was an African-American journalist, editor, fiction writer, and social activist. He cofounded and edited the Harlem Renaissance literary magazine Saturday Evening Quill and edited a magazine put out by the Boston John Reed Club. He wrote primarily on subjects related to racial discrimination and social justice. He published some fiction under pseudonyms, using Egor Don (which combines his first initial and last name) and (more rarely) Clark Hall and Frank Lynn.

Education and personal life

Eugene Gordon was born in Oviedo, Florida, in 1891 and raised in New Orleans, where he later recalled living through the Robert Charles riots.^[1][2] He attended Howard University and then Boston University, studying English and journalism.^[1]

In 1916, Gordon married Edythe Mae Chapman, a short story writer and poet.^[3] They separated in 1932 and divorced in 1942.^[4] His second wife, June Croll, was a noted labor organizer; they had a son together.^[1][4]

Writing career

On leaving school, Gordon served in World War I in Europe. After the war, he became a staff writer for the Boston Daily Post, rising to assistant feature writer in 1919.^[1] During the 1920s, he began publishing both fiction and nonfiction in periodicals like American Mercury, Scribner's Magazine, The Nation, and Plain Talk, as well as in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. His fiction ranged from stories about African-American life to a war story set in France. His short story “Game” won first prize in Opportunity magazine’s 1927 literary contest.^[1]

In 1925, Gordon organized an African-American literary group, the Saturday Evening Quill Club. Its founding members included fellow writers Helene Johnson and Dorothy West, and Gordon served as its president. Out of this grew an annual literary magazine, Saturday Evening Quill, which Gordon edited during its brief existence from 1928 to 1930.^[4]

Gordon joined the American Communist Party in 1931 and co-founded the Boston John Reed Club, becoming the first editor of the club magazine, Leftward.^[1] He moved to the Soviet Union for a year (1937–38) and became a reporter for the Moscow Daily News.^[5] On his return to the United States, he became a contributing editor, writer, and reporter for the leftist Daily Worker (1938–1946).^[1]

Gordon's nonfiction writing about social issues increased after he became a communist. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, he wrote about such topics as black labor, the rape of black women, the limits faced by black writers in an oppressive culture, and African Americans' relationship to political radicalism; this last essay appeared in Nancy Cunard's 1933 book Negro: An Anthology.^[2][6]

By the 1950s, Gordon had joined the staff of the radical leftist weekly National Guardian, for which he reported on the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia, which was an important step in the development of the Non-Aligned Movement. In the late 1950s, he wrote a column for the black press that lasted for about two years, "Another Side of the Story."^[1]

Gordon effectively retired from public life in the 1960s and turned his energies to watercolor painting.^[1]

When Gordon died in 1974, Henry Winston—then the chairman of the American Communist Party—praised him as "a dedicated partisan in the fight on many fronts for Democracy and Socialism."^[1] A more recent commentator assesses Gordon as a "hard-working, if uninspired" journalist of admirable dedication.^[5] His papers, including correspondence and various unpublished writings, are held by the New York Public Library.^[1]

Selected publications

Fiction;^[1]

• "Game" (as Egor Don, in Opportunity, 1927)
• "Southern Boyhood Nightmares" (in International Literature, 1934)

Nonfiction;^[1]

• "The Negro Press" (in American Mercury, 1925)
• "Christianity and the Negro" (in The Lantern, 1929)
• "The Negro Grows Up," (in Plain Talk, 1929)
• "Negro Fictionists in America" (in Saturday Evening Quill, 1929)
• “Blacks Turn Red” (in Negro: An Anthology, 1933)
• "Negro Novelists and the Negro Masses" (in New Masses, 1933)
• The Position of Negro Women (pamphlet, with Cyril Briggs, 1935)
• "How Prostitution Has Been Fought and Almost Completely Eliminated in the USSR" (in Moscow News, 1937)
• "Who Is George S. Schuyler" (in Worker, 1946)
• "Negro Labor Advances" (in Jewish Life, 1953)
• “The Green Hat Comes to Chambers Street” (in Nancy Cunard: Brave Poet, Indomitable Rebel, 1968)

References

1. Elizee, Andre. "Eugene Gordon Papers". New York Public Library website, April 2006.
2. Jackson, Lawrence Patrick. The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960. Princeton University Press, 2011, pp. 44–47.
3. Nelson, Emmanuel Sampath, ed. African American Authors, 1745-1945: Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000.
4. Mitchell, Verner, and Cynthia Davis. Literary Sisters: Dorothy West and Her Circle, A Biography of the Harlem Renaissance. Rutgers University Press, 2011, pp. 85–90.
5. "Eugene Gordon and the Sunday New York Times". Moscow Through Brown Eyes (blog), March 23, 2008.
6. Conforth, Bruce M. African American Folksong and American Cultural Politics: The Lawrence Gellert Story. Scarecrow Press, 2013.