like of which had never been known in Negro
journalism before” (Editorial). It was an experi-
mental journal that was “not interested in socio-
logical problems.” It was purely artistic in intent
and conception, its contributors choosing subjects
and characters from the proletariat, persons who
“still retained some individual race qualities and
were not totally white American in every respect
except skin color” (Thurman, “Negro Artists and
the Negro,” 196).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brawley, Benjamin. “The Negro Literary Renais-
sance.” Southern Workman 56 (1927).
Cullen, Countes. “Dark Tower.” Opportunity 25.
DuBois, W. E. B. “The Looking Glass.” Crisis 33
(1927).
Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography.
New York: Knopf, 1940.
———. “The Negro Artist and The Racial Moun-
tain.” In the Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader,
edited by David Levering Lewis, 91–95. New York:
Penguin Books, 1994.
Locke, Alain. “Review of Fire!!” Survey Graphic 58
(1927), 563.
“Review of Fire!!” Bookman, 64 (1926), 258–259.
Thurman, Wallace. Editorial. Harlem 1 (1928),
21–22.
———. “Fire Burns.” Fire!! 1 (1926), 47–48.
———. “Negro Artist and the Negro.” In The Col-
lected Writings of Wallace Thurman, edited by Ar-
mitjit Singh and Daniel M. Scott, 195–200. New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003.
———. “This Negro Literary Renaissance.” Unpub-
lished typed manuscript, Thurman Folder. Yale
University Beinecke Library, New Haven, Conn.
Lawrence T. Potter, Jr.
Fisher, Rudolph (1897–1934)
Novelist, short story writer, and essayist Rudolph
Fisher was born Rudolph John Chauncey on May
9, 1897, in Washington, D.C. After graduating from
Rhode Island’s prestigious Classical High School
in Providence, where his parents, Glenora Wil-
liamson Fisher and John Wesley Fisher, raised him,
he attended Brown University, receiving degrees
in English and biology with honors. Although
he pursued a master’s degree in English, the Phi
Beta Kappa, Delta Sigma Rho, and Sigma Xi hon-
oree graduated from Howard University Medical
School with highest honors in 1924. Fisher began
his professional career in medicine in 1925, when
he joined the staff of the National Research Coun-
cil at Columbia University’s College of Physicians
and Surgeons as a fellow studying bacteriology and
pathology. He began his own practice as a roent-
genologist (X-ray specialist) in 1927.
In 1925, Fisher caught the attention of HARLEM
RENAISSANCE writers when his signature story, “The
City of Refuge,” was published by the mainstream
Atlantic Monthly. ALAIN LOCKE showcased Fisher
as a quintessential example of new black writers
by including this story in his pioneering anthol-
og y, The NEW NEGRO, placing it alongside stories
by JEAN TOOMER, BRUCE NUGENT, ERIC WALROND,
and ZORA NEALE HURSTON.
In “The City of Refuge,” King Solomon Gil-
lis, a fugitive from the law in his small southern
town, travels north via Washington, D.C., to Har-
lem, “the land of plenty” and “the city of refuge,”
where he is totally mesmerized by his initial expe-
rience. Harlem, he decides, is the opposite of his
southern Jim Crow world. “In Harlem black was
white. You had rights that could not be denied
you; you had privileges, protected by law” (58).
Gillis is most struck by the fact that Harlem “even
got cullud policemans” (59). Soon after his arrival
in Harlem, however, Gillis becomes the victim of
a scam in which, unbeknownst to him, his newly
made friends use him as a fence for their drug
dealing business. Ironically, Gillis is arrested and
taken to jail by a black policeman, the symbol of
his arrival to the Promised Land, which, in the
end, Harlem is not.
With his focus on the city, subway system (“the
screeching onslaught of the fiery hosts of hell”
[Fisher, 57]), turnstiles, and throngs of meander-
ing bodies on the streets of Harlem, Fisher must
be recognized as an early 20th-century American
and African-American modernist. Much as Har-
lem threatens to suffocate CLAUDE MCKAY’s Jake
in HOME TO HARLEM and destroys Violet and JoeFisher, Rudolph 185