Harlem Renaissance - theory

During the 1920s, Harlem, the black community situated uptown in New York City, became a fashionable and cultural centre, featuring jazz musicians and composers like Duke Ellington or Bessie Smith. Ethel Waters, the black actress, triumphed on the stage, and black American dance and art flourished with music and drama. 

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) embraced African-American jazz rhythms and was one of the first black writers to attempt to make a profitable career out of his writing. Hughes incorporated blues, spirituals, colloquial speech, and folkways in his poetry. Hughes published numerous black anthologies and began black theatre groups in Los Angeles and Chicago, as well as New York City. He also wrote effective journalism, creating the character Jesse B. Semple ("simple") to express social commentary. One of his most beloved poems is "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (written 1921, published 1925). 

Countee Cullen (1903-1946) wrote rhymed poetry, in accepted forms, which was much admired by whites. He believed that a poet should not allow race to dictate the subject matter and style of a poem. On the other end of the spectrum were African Americans who rejected the United States in favour of Marcus Garvey's "Back to Africa" movement. Somewhere in between lies the work of Jean Toomer.

 Jean Toomer (1894-1967) Like Cullen, African-American fiction writer and poet Jean Toomer envisioned an American identity that would transcend race. Perhaps for this reason, he employed poetic traditions of rhyme and meter and did not seek out new "black" forms for his poetry. His major work, Cane (1923), incorporates poems, prose vignettes, stories, and autobiographical notes. 

Richard Wright (1908-1960) was born into a poor Mississippi family that his father deserted when the boy was five. Wright was the first African-American novelist to reach a general audience. His harsh childhood is depicted in one of his best books, his autobiography, Black Boy (1945). His work includes Uncle Tom's Children (1938), a book of short stories, and the novel Native Son (1940), in which Bigger Thomas, an uneducated black youth, mistakenly kills his white employer's daughter, gruesomely burns the body, and murders his black girlfriend -- fearing she will betray him.

Zora Neale Hurston (1903-1960) was born in the small town of Eatonville, Florida. She first came to New York City at the age of 16 as a member of a travelling theatrical troupe. 

 As a gifted storyteller who captivated her listeners, she attended Barnard College, where she studied with anthropologist Franz Boaz, who urged her to collect folklore from her native Florida environment, which she did. Her most important work, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), is a story of a beautiful mulatto woman's growing up and searching for happiness as she moves through three marriages. The novel evokes the lives of AfricanAmericans working the land in the rural South. Hurston inspired and influenced such contemporary writers as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison through books such as her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942).