Robert Bone

Robert Adamson Bone (1924 – November 25, 2007) was a scholar of African-American literature and a professor of English at Columbia University.

Biography Bone was a conscientious objector during World War II.

Works 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).