The Great Migration--the exodus of more than six million blacks from         their southern homes hoping for better lives in the North--is a defining         event of post-emancipation African-American life and a central feature         of twentieth-century black literature. Lawrence Rodgers explores the historical         and literary significance of this event and in the process identifies         the Great Migration novel as a literary form that intertwines geography         and identity.       Drawing on a wide range of major literary voices, including Richard Wright,         Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, as well as lesser-known writers such         as William Attaway (Blood on the Forge) and Dorothy West (The Living Is         Easy), Rodgers conducts a kind of literary archaeology of the Great Migration.         He mines the writers' biographical connections to migration and teases         apart the ways in which individual novels relate to one another, to the         historical situation of black America, and to African-American literature         as a whole.       In reading migration novels in relation to African-American literary         texts such as slave narratives, folk tales, and urban fiction, Rodgers         affirms the southern folk roots of African-American culture and argues         for a need to stem the erosion of southern memory.