Marita O. Bonner, early twentieth century African American public intellectual and creative writer, wrote particularly about the experiences of blacks in Chicago. Though most Bonner scholarship focuses primarily on her working class female characters, this study provides close readings of the young male figures in the short stories, One Boy\u27s Story, The Makin\u27s, The Whipping, There Were Three, Tin Can, and Nothing New. I analyze how these texts confront notions of family, personal identity, and violence, and how Bonner configures young life as a volatile liminal space of human development. As seen in Bonner\u27s short stories and in her essay The Young Blood Hungers, she continually promotes childhood and adolescence as compelling and complicated aspects of the American black experience. Youth is an integral category in investigating not only Bonner\u27s works, but in examining the Harlem Renaissance era
