All were completed between 1936 and 1940. The texts of the five stories and one essay in Uncle Tom’s Children are from their first collected appearance, and these texts are the last, or last-known, versions that Wright approved. A great deal of material pertaining to the publication of this work, including typescripts, page proofs, and correspondence between Wright and his publishers, is contained in the James Weldon Johnson Collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Other significant materials are held in the Fales Collection of the New York University Library and the Firestone Library at Princeton University. Uncle Tom’s Children was Wright’s first book to be published. Issued by Harper and Brothers in 1938 as a Story Press Book, it contained four stories, two of which had been published previously: “Big Boy Leaves Home” in The New Caravan in 1936; and “Fire and Cloud” in the March 1938 Story Magazine. The other two stories—“Long Black Song” and “Down by the Riverside”—appeared for the first time in the Harper collection in 1938.
