American Daughter

Journalist Era Bell Thompson, a lasting influence on the Chicago Renaissance, has not been widely recognized for her autobiographical work. In 1947 Thompson was one of the first editors of Ebony magazine, working for the publication until her death in 1986. American Daughter, Thompson’s autobiography written in Chicago, is a meditation on being a black woman in both black urban spaces and the white rural spaces of her childhood in North Dakota. Thompson utilizes the landscape and geography as metaphor for a form of double-consciousness between urban center and the white western frontier of North Dakota. As literary scholar Dr. Joanne M. Braxton writes, Thompson’s autobiography reveals “a growing sense of displacement that is geographic, cultural, and social.”