Part of what we can do to begin to redress the wrongs perpetrated against the black community is to read the works of black writers. In assembling a list of books to read in the next while, I discovered that there’s an astonishing depth with the quantity of writing available by nearly every black writer of note. Howard Ramsby II writes about this high level of output:
In the last 18 months of his life, Richard Wright wrote 4,000 haiku, which is to say, he composed 12,000 lines of poetry. Between 1976 and 1984, Octavia Butler published 6 novels. From 1990 through 1997, Walter Mosley published 7 novels and a collection of short stories. From April 1999 to March 2006, Aaron McGruder produced The Boondocks, which contained about 2,500 multi-panel strips. From August 2008 through August 2009, Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his first year of blogging for The Atlantic, published more than 2,000 blog entries.
At some point, we should say more about high productivity and black writers.
Many of the scholarly articles on African American literature in our field concentrate on one or two works at a time. Scholars tend to focus on the quality of a select work by an author as opposed to the quantity of works some writers produce. Why has that been the focus for so long? Is it because of the auras associated with "best" and "masterpiece," considerations more well-suited for studying a single work as opposed to a body of works?