The Author of “For My People”

Abstract

This chapter narrates how Margaret Walker’s growing radicalism motivated an intense work ethic that allowed her to divide her time efficiently between the Writers’ Project and her own writing. She was learning to focus her creative energies and work on the “northside novel.” Knowing poetry to be her strongest artistic form, the most likely to bring recognition, she was committed to improving her skills in fiction writing as much as she could. Walker was then introduced to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Reading Hurston undoubtedly precipitated an interest in the works of Black women writers. Given the pressure Walker was under, one might expect slow progress on her own projects, but she remained highly productive. However, the transformation that her folk sketches needed did not occur until she went to Iowa in 1939: they became folk ballads that form the second part of For My People.