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Authors
Carlos Bulosan (b. 1911)
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Bulosan’s published works include The Voice of Bataan (1943), The Laughter of My Father (1944), and America Is in the Heart (1946), which was reissued with an introduction by Carey McWilliams in 1973. Compilations drawing on his books, magazine fiction, and manuscripts have been edited and introduced by E. San Juan Jr.; these include The Philippines Is in the Heart (1978), If You Want to Know What We Are: A Carlos Bulosan Reader (1983), On Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan (1995), and The Cry and the Dedication (1995). Two biographical treatments are P. C. Morantte’s Remembering Carlos Bulosan: His Heart Affair with America (1984) and Susan Evangelista’s Carlos Bulosan and His Poetry: A Biography and Anthology (1985). San Juan has also written a critical study, Carlos Bulosan and the Imagination of the Class Struggle (1972). Rachel C. Lee’s The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (1999) includes a chapter on Bulosan.
Doing his best work in the forties, Bulosan entered an American literary scene overshadowed by Anderson, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Cather, and other latter-day realists and naturalists, to whom he is often compared. Bulosan was also a good friend of Carl Sandburg, William Saroyan, and other artists who are remembered for a very different spirit as they explored the life and struggles of working people, recent immigrants, and American minorities. If we situate Bulosan in a larger and more diverse family of American writers, how is a reading of his own work enriched?
Questions for Discussion and Writing
1. Reread the final paragraph of “Be American,” and then read Carl Sandburg’s short famous poem “Chicago” in the Norton Anthology of American Literature. What are the similarities in spirit? In each work, what has to be overcome to affirm that spirit? Are these works surprising in their respective conclusions?
2. How would you describe Bulosan’s protagonists? What are the problems and the advantages, for a writer, of centering stories on people with these aspirations and this inner life?
