| | List of Illustrations | p. ix |
| | Acknowledgments | p. xi |
| | Introduction: Irredeemable Promise: The Bittersweet Career of J. Saunders Redding | p. 1 |
| | Three Swinging Sisters: Harlem, Howard, and the South Side (1934-1936) | p. 15 |
| | The Black Avant-Garde between Left and Right (1935-1939) | p. 42 |
| | A New Kind of Challenge (1936-1939) | p. 68 |
| | The Triumph of Chicago Realism (1938-1940) | p. 93 |
| | Bigger Thomas among the Liberals (1940-1943) | p. 123 |
| | Friends in Need of Negroes: Bucklin Moon and Thomas Sancton (1942-1945) | p. 149 |
| | "Beating That Boy": White Writers, Critics, Editors, and the Liberal Arts Coalition (1944-1949) | p. 178 |
| | Afroliberals and the End of World War II (1945-1946) | p. 196 |
| | Black Futilitarianists and the Welcome Table (1945-1947) | p. 219 |
| | The Peril of Something New, or, the Decline of Social Realism (1947-1948) | p. 258 |
| | The Negro New Liberal Critic and the Big Little Magazine (1948-1949) | p. 275 |
| | The Communist Dream of African American Modernism (1947-1950) | p. 297 |
| | The Insinuating Poetics of the Mainstream (1949-1950) | p. 323 |
| | Still Looking for Freedom (1949-1954) | p. 342 |
| | The Expatriation: The Price of Brown and the New Bohemians (1952-1955) | p. 379 |
| | Liberal Friends No More: The Rubble of White Patronage (1956-1958) | p. 411 |
| | The End of the Negro Writer (1955-1960) | p. 444 |
| | The Reformation of Black New Liberals (1958-1960) | p. 470 |
| | Prometheus Unbound (1958-1960) | p. 485 |
| | Notes | p. 511 |
| | Index | p. 559 |