William Alexander Attaway (November 19, 1911 – June 17, 1986) was an African-American novelist, short story writer, essayist, songwriter, playwright, and screenwriter.

When Attaway was six, he moved with his family to Chicago, Illinois, as part of the Great Migration, to escape the segregated South.

In Chicago, Attaway showed little interest in school until he was assigned a poem written by Langston Hughes.

(1936) from the University of Illinois and having published "The Tale of the Blackamoor" in Challenge, he traveled around the US before settling into New York City.

Belafonte continues the term "folk" was originally applied only to the peasants and farmers of the Old World, who had never learned to read or write.

(PP 23) One Hundred Years of Laughter, a television special on black humor, was one of his most important scripts that was airing in 1966.

Attaway is also credited as the screenwriter for the 1981 race-relations TV movie Grambling's White Tiger, directed by Roots actor Georg Stanford Brown.

Blood on the Forge uses the lives of three brothers to describe the battle that the African-American community went through in order to achieve acceptance and equality.

His vivid portrayal of The Great Migration gives the reader an honest insight into the struggles of the African-American community as they moved out of the Southern United States fighting for a better life that they weren't necessarily guaranteed.

By focusing on the experiences of the Moss brothers in Blood on the Forge, Attaway effectively dramatizes the loss of the folk culture which accompanied the Great Migration of Black people from the rural South to the industrial North, in this case the steel mills of Pennsylvania, around the time of World War I.

Though an involved system of symbolic characterization and imagery, Attaway weaves an intricate examination of what might be called the death of the blues—at least the blues as representative of the folk culture.

[12] Attaway's literary legacy rests primarily with his novel Blood on the Forge, which has been called the finest depiction of the Great Migration era in American literature.

Attaway retains an important place among African-American writers of the early 20th century; the reprinting of Blood on the Forge in 1993 has brought renewed critical and popular attention to his writing.