This study highlights how the novels under discussion--erasure, John Henry Days, Man Gone Down, and Fanon-- fall within traditions of the Kunstlerroman, understanding literature as art and as narrative representation. Analysis focuses greatly on the study of masculinist representation wherein the visage of blackness is always engaged in a larger politics of repression and reassertion, a state of tension that in turn engenders the desire to move beyond the oppositional interplay of irresolvably competing images. Moreover, all of the protagonists under discussion are literary artists whose arrested development demonstrates the collaborating social impact of personal privacy, self-obliteration, and the creation of fictional narratives or fields. The dissertation exposes the degree to which such arrested development, or wounding, is located in the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education legislation and the degree to which such wounding is utilized by Everett, Whitehead, Thomas, and Wideman for literary generative purposes in the representations of the narratives of their writer-protagonists in the novels selected.