Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best
poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant “If We Must Die” (1919) to the brooding
self-portrait “Outcast,” was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called
the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as
Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay’s formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl
Sandburg.
Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a
much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry.
Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and
file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success
through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John
Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly
evoked in his most famous poem, “Heritage” (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson
embraced the African American oral tradition in God’s Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to
the folk sermon tradition of Southern Black Americans.
Novelists
McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay’s novel Home to
Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more
lurid side of Harlem’s nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes’s The Big
Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the
Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem
Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Henry
Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer’s Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of
sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of
any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade.
Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately
fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language
and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher’s The Walls of
Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel’s balanced satire of class and color
prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often
referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry
(1929) exposes color prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African
American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality.
The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her
novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a
sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial
and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem
Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native
Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel
until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her
permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black
community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie
Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.
The Harlem Renaissance
The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature
and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an
anthology edited by writer and educator Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the
most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,
and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.
The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-
confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to
eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and
literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of
major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the
Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favor and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few,
well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.
