Sad-Faced Boy Explained

Sad-faced Boy is a 1937 children's novel by Arna Wendell Bontemps and illustrated by Virginia Lee Burton.^[1] It tells the adventures of three rural boys Slumber, his big brother Rags, and Willie Dozier who travel alone from Alabama to visit Harlem in New York.^[2] Bontemps's book, although aimed at children, carried a heavy social warning, that life in the industrial north would still carry the challenges of oppression and prejudice of the South.^{[3] [4]}

Notes and References

1. Book: Sad-faced boy. www.worldcat.org . OCLC . 176846 . October 9, 2017.
2. Katharine Capshaw Smith Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance 2006 0253218888- Page 262 "Bontemps will not directly reenact the Scottsboro case; he does not, for example, place his characters in a car with white travelers, the situation which ... "
3. Laura Gray-Rosendale, Sibylle Gruber Alternative Rhetorics: Challenges to the Rhetorical Tradition -0791449734 2001 Page 151 "Bontemps' book disrupted the notion that a shift to the North would easily abolish the oppressions of the South such as ... Slumber, Rags, and Willie Dozier, and their migration from the rural South of Alabama to the Northern city of Harlem."
4. African American Review - Page 28 1998 And apparently Bontemps identified himself as the "Sad-Faced Author," the title of another Horn Book magazine article ... Instead he traced the origin of his Sad-Faced Boy characters (Slumber, Rags, and Willie) to J. P. Morgan and two of his