Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-2025
Publication Title
Printing History
Publisher
American Printing History Association
Abstract
William Stanley Braithwaite (1878–1962) began his life with printed words as a printer’s apprentice with Ginn and Company in Massachusetts. Unlike Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, all of whom began their meteoric literary careers by typesetting, Braithwaite’s rise was thwarted by the cultural stereotyping around race. It isn’t surprising, therefore, that throughout his career as anthologizer, publisher, poet, critic, and Boston Evening Transcript columnist, William Stanley Braithwaite used his facility with type to inform valuations of narrative and language with an eye not to race-blind aspects of literature, but to ways race might be recognized as a historically and culturally specific construct.
Braithwaite represented a new kind of bookman, a Black man who imagined print and his engagement with print as profoundly connected to his racial and cultural identity in new ways. His theories of editing and poetic form may not have promoted race consciousness in its most conventional sense. However, his sense of poetic traditions and expressive form, as manifested in his editorial fascination with vacillations between temporal and atemporal themes, demonstrated a keen sensitivity to emancipatory aspects of language. After all, no one more than a former typesetter would be aware of how stereotyping and typecasting might be set and yet also mobile, precisely fixed, and yet vulnerable to intervention.
Recommended Citation
Chicago style: The Free Library. S.v. More Bookman than Bookerite: William Stanley Braithwaite and Poetic Stereotypes.." Retrieved Apr 26 2025 from https://www.thefreelibrary.com/More+Bookman+than+Bookerite%3a+William+Stanley+Braithwaite+and+Poetic...-a0833610238
Included in
African American Studies Commons, Other American Studies Commons, United States History Commons
Comments
COPYRIGHT 2025 The American Printing History Association. No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission of the copyright holder.