Why I Left America and Other Essays

To American black newspapers of the 1930s and 1940s "Ollie" Harrington was a prolific contributor of humorous and editorial cartoons. He emerged as an artist during the Harlem Renaissance and created Bootsie, the popular cartoon figure that became a fixture in black newspapers. Langston Hughes praised Harrington as America's greatest black cartoonist. After serving as a war correspondent in Italy, he returned to his homeland and the impediment of racism that pervaded American life. As director of public relations for the NAACP, he crusaded against America's policies of institutionalized racism, openly supporting leftist reform leaders. Upon hearing in this era of "red-baiting" that he was targeted for investigation, Harrington left America. In the culturally rich American community on the Left Bank in Paris that would come to include Chester Himes, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, he became a fixture. In 1961 he found himself trapped behind the Berlin Wall, but he chose to remain in East Germany. His cartoons appeared in East German magazines and in the American Communist newspaper The Daily World. Although he became a favorite with Eastern Bloc students and intellectuals, in America Harrington was mainly forgotten.

The autobiographical pieces included in Why I Left America and Other Essays, written mainly during the 1960s and 1970s, detail Oliver W. Harrington's experiences as an African American artist in exile. One theme that persists in these writings and his cartoons is his intolerance of racism. Hence, as an artist, he has found it impossible not to be political.

One essay, from Ebony magazine, fuels speculation about the mysterious circumstances in the death of his friend Richard Wright. In another piece Harrington details how he created the celebrated Bootsie. He writes in others of his life in New York during the Harlem Renaissance and in Paris with fellow black expatriate figures. Why did this African American choose to live in exile for over forty years? In an affectionate foreword to this volume Richard Wright's daughter Julia gives clues to the answer. Her insights, along with M. Thomas Inge's introductory essay about Harrington's life and achievements, bring special focus to the experiences of an outstanding African American artist and social critic who has been virtually without recognition in his homeland.

Oliver W. Harrington (1912-1995), cartoonist and political satirist, was an outspoken advocate for civil rights. He lived in exile in East Berlin for many years.

M. Thomas Inge is the Robert Emory Blackwell Professor of Humanities at Randolph-Macon College.

An African-American artist, self-exiled behind the Iron Curtain, gives his unique perspective on his homeland and on the culture that produced him

Publishers Weekly

Cartoonist, fine artist and self-exiled African American, Harrington reflects on his life in this collection of nine autobiographical essays, reprinted mainly from magazines in the 1960s and 1970s. Born in 1912 and raised in the South Bronx, he began in 1935 a cartoon series in the Amsterdam News featuring a wise fool named Bootsie; his work for the NAACP subjected Harrington to charges of pro-Communism and he became an expatriate in 1951. He recalls his Paris friendship with author Richard Wright, ``a man of irrepressible vitality'' and hints at foul play in Wright's death in a French clinic in 1960. His accounts of life in raffish Harlem are rich. A Jewish grocer told young Ollie of Paul Robeson; later he and the performer began ``a treasured friendship.'' In France, Harrington found acceptance; though racism exists there, it's not oppressive, he reflects in the title essay, based on a speech he gave in Detroit in 1991. Harrington's criticism of American racism is potent, but his embrace of socialism seems, in retrospect, wishful. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Oct.)