the hostile racial and political contexts in which he lived, including Jim Crow and McCarthyism. Chinitz’s focus on Hughes’s ambivalence about such compromise proves to be a nuanced interpretive approach and it leads him to focus on Hughes’s Simple stories and other prose as well as Hughes’s poetry. He also analyzes Hughes’s testimony before the McCarthy committee (which is reproduced in two appendices), making an important contribution to Hughes scholarship. The final section of the book addresses Hughes’s varied reflections on Booker T. Washington. Which Sin to Bear? benefits from the generous and multiple forms of research support Chinitz mentions in his acknowledgments. (354–55)

Jeff Westover
Boise State University

American Literary Scholarship 2013
	In Which Sin to Bear? (Oxford) David Chinitz focuses on the cultural analysis of black authenticity and the compromises Hughes encountered in his effort to make a living as a writer when all the odds were against him. Chinitz investigates how Hughes developed a public image as a representative member of the black working class. “In more than one way,” he writes, “Hughes had to perform the authentic blackness that would be popularly assumed, in time, to have been his birthright.” Chinitz also explores how that process motivated Hughes’s artistic experimentation with dialect, blues, and persona in his poetry and other forms of writing. Chinitz views as an ethical issue Hughes’s “ability to compromise” between his ideals and his need to make a living, given		the hostile racial and political contexts in which he lived, including Jim Crow and McCarthyism. Chinitz’s focus on Hughes’s ambivalence about such compromise proves to be a nuanced interpretive approach and it leads him to focus on Hughes’s Simple stories and other prose as well as Hughes’s poetry. He also analyzes Hughes’s testimony before the McCarthy committee (which is reproduced in two appendices), making an important contribution to Hughes scholarship. The final section of the book addresses Hughes’s varied reflections on Booker T. Washington. Which Sin to Bear? benefits from the generous and multiple forms of research support Chinitz mentions in his acknowledgments. (354–55) Jeff Westover Boise State University