Harlem Renaissance
When Wallace Thurman announced his engagement to Louise Thompson in 1928, after just two months of courtship, tongues wagged: Harlem’s audacious “young upstart” was to marry the typewriter of his forthcoming novel, The Blacker the Berry (1929). Alain Locke—the self-appointed “mid-wife” of America’s New Negro Renaissance, which Thurman represented—immediately wrote to tell Thompson “how much I envy any man who has you for both a wife and secretary.”
On January 6, 1925, Jessie Redmon Fauset wrote a letter to Langston Hughes from Paris. It's a long letter—over a thousand words—and it balances advice with appeal in ways that capture the intimacy and strength of their friendship. Her first novel, There is Confusion, had been published in 1924 and Fauset was on leave from her position as the literary editor of The Crisis, studying and writing in Paris. She had planned the trip as a celebration: finally, at forty-two, she had published a novel.
The library cards and logbooks preserved in Sylvia Beach’s papers confirm the conventional image of Shakespeare and Company: the bookshop and lending library sat at the very heart of interwar modernism. The shop conjures images of Ernest Hemingway perusing the bookshelves and Gertrude Stein stopping by from her home a few streets away. James Joyce, George Antheil, and André Gide are among the many names we associate with the bookshop’s dazzling community. And the Shakespeare and Company records reflect their presence.
After the publication of the well-known sole issue of the Harlem Renaissance journal, FIRE!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists (1926), W. E. B. Du Bois wrote to the journal’s cofounder Richard Bruce Nugent and asked, “Why don’t you write more about Negroes?” In response, Nugent quipped, “I write about myself, and I’m a Negro, aren’t I?” (Wirth, “FIRE!! In Retrospect,” n. p.) (figs. 1 & 2). Du Bois’s question to the openly queer and artistically experimental Nugent exemplifies 1920s debates about Black American racial representation that occurred between older and younger Black artists, many of them centered in Harlem.