Roaring Twenties

Harlem Renaissance Literature: Novels, Poetry, and Essays

The literary wing of the Harlem Renaissance was the most public, most successful, and most lasting part of the movement. In the decade between roughly 1925 and 1935, a generation of Black American writers produced a body of novels, poetry, short fiction, and essays that had no real precedent in the country’s literature and that, by the 1940s, was being read as a foundational national inheritance. The writers did not agree on much. They argued fiercely about art, about race, about propaganda, and about the role of the folk. But they produced, together, the canon of the first great African American literary generation.

For the wider context, see the parent Harlem Renaissance cluster page and the 1920s Arts and Entertainment pillar overview. For the most important single writer, For the visual art and music,

The Foundations: Locke, Du Bois, and the Literary Magazines

The literary Harlem Renaissance is conventionally dated to the 1925 publication of Alain Locke’s The New Negro, an anthology subtitled An Interpretation and issued by Albert and Charles Boni in New York. Locke, a Harvard-educated philosophy professor at Howard University, edited the volume and wrote its famous introductory essay “The New Negro,” which became the canonical statement of the modernist wing of the movement. The book collected fiction, poetry, essays, and visual art by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, the sculptor Sargent Johnson, and the bibliophile Arthur A. Schomburg, whose collection of African American materials was acquired by the New York Public Library in 1926 and now forms the core of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

The institutional framework for the new literature was built in the years before 1925. The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP, had been founded in 1910 by Du Bois and used as a literary as well as a political forum; Jessie Fauset served as its literary editor from 1919 to 1926. Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, founded in 1923 by the National Urban League under Charles S. Johnson, was the other principal venue. Johnson’s annual literary contests between 1924 and 1928 helped launch the careers of Hughes, Hurston, Cullen, and Arna Bontemps. The Harmon Foundation awards, established by the white real-estate developer William E. Harmon, gave cash prizes and wider recognition to Black writers from 1926 onward.

The white patrons played an ambiguous role. Charlotte Osgood Mason supported Hughes, Hurston, and Toomer between 1927 and 1930, but on terms that required them to present Black folk culture in a way the more politically committed writers found degrading. Carl Van Vechten, the white novelist, organized the 1924 party that introduced Hughes and Cullen to the white New York literary scene, and his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven was both a commercial sensation and a lightning rod for criticism of the white gaze on Harlem nightlife.

The Major Writers

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) is the writer most closely identified with the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Joplin, Missouri, he published “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in The Crisis in 1921, and his first book, The Weary Blues, won the Opportunity magazine prize in 1925 and was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926. His jazz-inflected verse, his celebration of the Black vernacular, and his 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (published in The Nation) made him the most influential poet of the movement.

Countee Cullen (1903-1946) was the most decorated Black poet of the early Harlem Renaissance. His poem “Color” appeared in Harper’s magazine in 1925, and his anthology Caroling Dusk (1925) was the first major Black verse anthology of the decade. His debut collection Color (1927) and his narrative sequence The Black Christ (1929) earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship. Cullen was the adopted son of the Reverend and Mrs. Frederick A. Cullen of Harlem’s Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, and he took a PhD at New York University in the 1930s.

Claude McKay (1889-1948), born in Jamaica, came to the United States in 1912 and was the first Black writer of the decade to address the new political moment head-on. His 1919 poem “If We Must Die,” written in response to the Red Summer of racial violence, was reprinted across the country and made him a public figure. His 1928 novel Home to Harlem, the first novel by a Black writer to win wide acclaim, won the Harmon Gold Award and was the bestselling novel of the year for the Black reading public. His sequel Banjo (1929) and his Jamaican novel Banana Bottom (1932) extended the project.

Jean Toomer (1894-1967) published Cane in 1923, an experimental hybrid of prose, poetry, and drama set in the rural Georgia of the 1890s and the Washington, D.C. of the 1920s. Cane was the single most influential work of the early Harlem Renaissance and the only major novel of the period that is still routinely read as a work of high modernism rather than a document of the movement.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), the daughter of a Florida sharecropper, was sent by Charles S. Johnson to Eatonville, Florida, in 1927 to do anthropological field work. Her short story “Sweat” appeared in 1926, her first novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine in 1934, her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937, and her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road in 1942. After a controversial 1948 arrest, Hurston fell into obscurity and died in poverty in 1960. She was rediscovered in 1975 by Alice Walker.

Nella Larsen (1891-1964) was the Danish-West Indian novelist whose Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) treated the experience of light-skinned Black women passing for white in a way that no earlier American novelist had. Jessie Fauset (1882-1961), the literary editor of The Crisis, published four novels, including There Is Confusion (1924) and Plum Bun (1929). Wallace Thurman (1902-1934) edited the magazine Fire!! in 1926 and published the satirical The Blacker the Berry (1929), an attack on intraracial color prejudice. James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), executive secretary of the NAACP, published God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse in 1927 and edited the foundational Book of American Negro Poetry in 1922.

The Novels, the Poetry, and the Presses

The decade produced a remarkable run of novels. Hughes’s Not Without Laughter (1930), the first novel by a Black writer to receive a major commercial publisher’s backing, was the most commercially successful. George Schuyler’s satire Black No More (1931) and Thurman’s Infants of the Spring (1930) are the most underrated. The poetry of the period was supported by small but determined presses, most prominently Harcourt, Brace, Knopf, and Boni & Liveright. The Harmon Foundation awards and the Guggenheim Fellowships (introduced in 1925) gave writers the means to write full-time.

The Legacy

The literary Harlem Renaissance ended, in any institutional sense, by the mid-1930s. The Depression had shrunk the white audience for Black literature, Cullen was teaching in New York, and Hughes had turned to the theater and the popular front. But the body of work they produced in a single decade remained, and the writers who came after — Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison — would all acknowledge the Harlem Renaissance as the foundation on which their own careers were built.

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