This Is Life: Rediscovered Short Fiction by Frank London Brown collects the forgotten writing of a Chicago Renaissance writer at his height, showcasing vivid vignettes of Black life in the city 60 years ago. Published this June by From Beyond Press, This Is Life compiles Brown’s flash fiction written for the Chicago Daily Defender in 1959 and 1960.
A novelist, civil rights activist, and impassioned journalist, Brown is one of the vital voices of the Chicago Renaissance, alongside Black Chicago literary realists like Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Richard Wright. He left a vast, unorthodox legacy through his work as a union organizer with United Packinghouse Workers of America, a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, and a seasoned contributor to numerous newspapers and journals in Chicago—whose coverage of the murder of Emmett Till for the Defender led to nationwide coverage.
Published in 1959, his first novel, Trumbull Park, fictionalized the real-life ordeals of the first Black families to integrate Chicago’s Trumbull Park public housing project in the 1950s. A semi-autobiographical book, Trumbull Park chronicled the racist abuse and acts of terrorism that white residents enacted against Black families moving in.
Diagnosed with leukemia in 1962, Brown died the following year at age 34. His second novel, The Myth Maker, was posthumously released in 1969. In many ways, This Is Life is a vivid glimpse into the literary career that could have been. While lesser known than other Black Renaissance writers, Brown has been getting his literary due in recent years. In 2019, he was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. “You Remember Frank London Brown,” an exhibition celebrating his legacy and the movements he shaped, is on display at the University of Chicago’s Arts+Public Life for the summer.
This Is Life comprises 133 fictional pieces, slice-of-life stories of Black Chicagoans at the most unexpected of times. Like flies trapped in amber, its characters inhabit a Chicago long gone. Brown drops his readers in the midst of the action—in the minds of couples ready to destroy their marriages or begin new lives together. Driving by the lakeshore, a motorist remembers the woman he once loved and murdered. A crying baby wakes its exhausted mother before a raging fire can burn down their apartment. Two hired hit men muse philosophically about the nature of man while waiting for their target to arrive. Regret, rage, and reverence circle in the minds of his protagonists. Characters nurse bliss and misery alike—making full arcs or twist endings in 200 words or less. Brown’s writing shines brightest in its dialogue, with biting, funny prose that can tell a lot in little time.
Brown’s writings are filled with the kind of social and political commentary that characterized his journalism and political activism. A white mob chases two brothers with bricks and bats. Two young men debate why “the poor” can’t help themselves without noticing people begging for money along Madison Avenue. A police officer on trial for robbery walks out of court a free man after pleading that poverty pushed him to desperation. There is an immediacy to his writing that is impossible to ignore, even decades later.
At times, This Is Life is reminiscent of people’s poetry espoused by Gwendolyn Brooks or Langston Hughes. It offers portraits of ordinary Black Chicagoans in the mid-20th century, many of whom are ground down by northern segregation, poverty, and violence. The readers instantly find themselves in Chicago—exiting el stations, strolling by hotels and landmarks that have disappeared or in neighborhoods that are still familiar. The city is a character as much as its people. Occasionally, we are transported to prerevolutionary Havana, Korean battlefields, Mexico, Mississippi, and landscapes that are more science fiction than reality.
This Is Life is as much found fiction as it is flash fiction. Many of these stories in the Defender were lost—previously unsigned or only published with the initials F.L.B. From Beyond Press publisher Michael W. Phillips Jr. first learned about the work from Northwestern professor Rebecca Zorach; these stories are now being published as a collection for the first time.
When contacted by From Beyond Press, Brown’s eldest daughter Debra E. Brown-Thompson was surprised at this discovery. “When these short, short stories were discovered, it was like finding a deep treasure more precious than gold because I was so young when he wrote them. I never knew they existed.” Brown-Thompson, award-winning author Sandra Jackson-Opoku, and Zorach all contribute forewords contextualizing his work, accompanied by a response by Nile Lansana, a poet and interdisciplinary artist from the south side. Lansana, whose work focuses on amplifying marginalized voices and narratives through a lens of Black imagination, attempts to encapsulate Brown’s evocative style through two original pieces of his own.
Brown’s writing enters into the lives of these characters and stays awhile, lingering by the doorway. While quick to read, they present a remarkable empathy for all kinds of characters and the precise details that shape their lives. Some stories leave you with a smile, others offer loss or some sort of unresolved tension to mull over. All pry open a window into the private lives of Black Chicagoans, and each rolls into the next to tell a story of the city.
As Brown-Thompson writes in the foreword, “Through this collection, my father invites readers to peek through the windows of 133 lives. As voyeurs, we are compelled to bear witness to their stories, joys, sorrows, and complexities so eloquently wrapped in the essence of the Black experience with empathy, insight, and authenticity.”
This Is Life: Rediscovered Short Fiction by Frank London Brown
From Beyond Press, paperback, 100 pp., $10.99, frombeyondpress.com
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