Bone's book
The Negro Novel in America, his Yale dissertation, was published in two editions in 1958 and 1965, and translated into
Japanese. In it, Bone identifies four periods of African-American literature: a period of
assimilation into the white
middle class from 1890 to 1920, the
pluralism of the
Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, a period of
naturalism and
protest during the
Great Depression of the 1930s, and a "revolt against protest" in the 1940s. He discusses in detail many novels from each period, reserving particular praise for
Richard Wright's
Native Son (1940) and
Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man (1952). ==References==