Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
Here's a selection of reviews of writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
Cane by Jean Toomer
Jonah's Gourd Vine by Zora Neale Hurston
The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes
Black Boy by Richard Wright
The Wedding by Dorothy West
Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
Northeastern University Press, 1928
Novel, 340 pages
Claude McKay, a writer often associated with the Harlem Renaissance, tells us Jake's story in Home to Harlem. A veteran of World War I, Jake returns to an America that provides few opportunities for a black man. We learn about his friendships, his loves, his jobs and life in Harlem in the twenties. A ground breaking and important book, Home to Harlem shows a life and culture in all its raw and seamy exuberance and in the dialect of the people living it. Jake meets and sleeps with a succession of "chippies," but never forgets the "lost brown" whom he has fallen in love with. All the dangers and beauty of the times are brought to the reader in a memorable chronicle of an era. R.T.
Excerpt
Jake, since he had given up hoping about his lost brown, had stopped haunting the Baltimore, yet he had happened to be very much in on the affair that cost the Baltimore its license. Jake's living with Rose had, in spite of himself, projected him into a more elegant atmosphere or worldliness. Through Rose and her associates he had gained access to buffet flats and private rendezvous apartments that were called "nifty."
And Jake was a high favorite wherever he went. There was something so naturally beautiful about his presence that everybody liked and desired him. Buddies, on the slightest provocation, were ready to fight for him, and girls liked to make an argument around him.
Cane by Jean Toomer
Originally published 1923
Sketches, poems, and stories, 116 pages
Cane is one of the works of fiction that announced the arrival of the Harlem Renaissance. Though a slim volume, this collection of sketches, stories and poems makes up a dense and powerful book. Through vivid imagery and authentic dialects, Jean Toomer realistically portrays the lives and experiences of African-Americans, from the Southern peasant to the urban black in the North. Neither glorified nor stereotyped, Toomer's characters speak in their own voices and are completely themselves, their behavior reflecting the truth about who and what they are. Cane compels the reader to feel its power on a physical level. At the time the book was published, and still today, these full, rich characters and images lead us to a greater understanding of the human condition. N.P.
Excerpt
Up from the skeleton stone walls, up from the rotting floor boards and the solid hand-hewn beams of oak of the prewar cotton factory, dusk came. Up from the dusk the full moon came. Glowing like a fired pine-knot, it illumined the great door and soft showered the Negro shanties aligned along the single street of factory town. The full moon in the great door was an omen. Negro women improvised songs against its spell.
Jonah's Gourd Vine by Zora Neale Hurston
Originally published 1934
Novel, 206 pages
Zora Neale Hurston's works, though critically acclaimed in the 30's, did not find wide readership until the late 70's when Alice Walker rediscovered and drew attention to the Harlem Renaissance author. Since then, many prominent writers of the black experience have turned to her for inspiration. Jonah's Gourd Vine, Hurston's first novel, is the story of John Pearson, an uneducated black farm laborer who sets out to make a better life for himself. His God-given gifts, his "gourd vine," are his good looks and a way with words. These gifts, however, become his downfall, the Biblical worm that withers the vine. Lucy, his long-suffering wife, sees his gifts and his flaws, but cannot save him from himself. J.G.
Excerpt
"Ah ain't goin' tuh hush nothin' uh de kind. Youse livin' dirty and Ahm goin' tuh tell you 'bout it. Me and mah chillun got some rights. Big talk ain't changin' whut you doin'. You can't clean yo'self wid yo' tongue lak uh cat."
There was a resounding smack. Lucy covered her face with her hand, and John drew back in a sort of horror, and instantly strove to remove the brand from his soul by words, "Ah tole yuh tuh hush." He found himself shaking as he backed towards the door.
"De hidden wedge will come tuh light some day, John. Mark mah words. Youse in de majority now, but God sho don't love ugly."
The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes
Originally published 1934
Short stories, 255 pages
In this book of short stories, Langston Hughes showed himself to be a mesmerizing storyteller--with chilling, witty, grab-you-by-the-throat tales of African Americans living in a white man's world. From the Colonel whose "black bastard" son will not learn his place, to the artist couple who "went in for Negroes," Hughes knows the "ways of White folks." The people and places of the 1930's are real and detailed, but it is the universality of the hope, fears, and sufferings of his characters that make these vignettes timeless. J.M.
Excerpt
The little Negro whose name was Roy Williams began to choke on the blood in his mouth. And the roar of their voices and the scuff of their feet were split by the moonlight into a thousand notes like a Beethoven sonata. And when the white folks left his brown body, stark naked, strung from a tree at the edge of town, it hung there all night, like a violin for the wind to play.
Black Boy by Richard Wright
Originally published 1937
Autobiography, 285 pages
Black Boy is an autobiographical account of Richard Wright's childhood and early adulthood in the South of the 1910s and 20s. First abandoned by his father, then virtually orphaned when illness made an invalid of his mother, Richard was repeatedly uprooted and always accompanied by poverty, hunger, and cruelty. We see signs of the writer he would become as he discovers and puzzles over questions of racial identity; as he learns to fear and then hate white people; as he articulates his experience of religion as tyrannical and manipulative. Against all odds, Wright recognized and maintained his sense of personal integrity and entitlement at the core of his being, refusing to accept a status that would prevent him from tasting the full range of human experience. C.W.
Excerpt
I was in my fifteenth year; in terms of schooling I was far behind the average youth of the nation, but I did not know that. In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed. Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and, without my knowing it, the locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the bells and the screams that filled the air.
The Wedding by Dorothy West
Doubleday, 1995
Novel, 240 pages
The Wedding is the long awaited novel by Dorothy West, the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance. It takes us to the Oval on Martha's Vineyard, where we discover the summer-home world of the wealthy black community. As Shelby Coles' wedding approaches, we are invited to see the mores and history of this elite group, and to discover how their ancestors' struggles brought them to this privileged spot. On one hand, this community of old money and high society descended from slaves is a distinctive one. On the other hand, the families of the Oval mirror both the flaws and the attributes of any privileged group.
In her wholly original style, West uses language in creative and surprising ways. The reader may find herself rereading passages just for the description and insight. When you pick up this book, prepare for an enriching and enjoyable experience. R.T.
Excerpt
But how Shelby, who could have had her pick of the best of breed in her own race, could marry outside her race, outside her father's profession, and throw her life away on a nameless, faceless white man who wrote jazz, a frivolous occupation without office, title, or foreseeable future, was beyond the Oval's understanding.
Between the dark man Liz had married and the music maker Shelby was marrying, there was a whole area of eligible men of the right colors and right professions. For Liz and Shelby to marry so contrary to expectations affronted all the subtle tenets of their training.
Though Shelby might have been headstrong in her choice of a husband, at least she had let her mother dissuade her from following Liz's lead and eloping. Her wedding would have the Oval setting that Corinne had promised Miss Adelaide Bannister on a golden afternoon in her daughter's teens.
