editor at The Looking Glass and became managing
editor of the MESSENGER, where his editorial exper-
tise earned him renown. He published works by
Hughes and ZORA NEALE HURSTON. He left in the
autumn of 1926 to join the staff of a white-owned
periodical, World Tomorrow. In summer 1926,
Thurman, along with Hughes, edited FIRE!!. Tw o
years later, Thurman published Harlem: A Forum
of Negro Life, a more moderate, broadly focused
magazine that was devoted to displaying works
by younger writers. Both Fire!!! and Harlem failed
after their premier issues.
Although considered a minor literary figure,
Thurman was lauded as a satirist. Thurman re-
jected the idea that the Harlem Renaissance was
a substantial literary movement, claiming that the
1920s produced no outstanding writers and that
those who were famous exploited whites and al-
lowed themselves to be patronized by them. He
claimed, as did a number of authors of the decade,
that white critics judged black works by lower
standards than they judged white efforts.
Written in collaboration with Jourdan Rapp,
Thurman’s first play, Harlem: A Melodrama of
Negro Life, opened on Broadway on February 20,
1929, at the Apollo Theater, bringing Thurman
immediate success. Harlem centers on the Wil-
liams family, who relocate in New York City to es-
cape economic difficulties at the time of the Great
Migration of southerners to the North during the
first two decades of the 20th century. But instead
of finding the city a promised land, they encounter
many of the problems that often plagued the fami-
lies of the migration: unemployment and tensions
between generations heightened by difficulties in
adjusting to city life.
Thurman’s best-known work is his first novel,
The Blacker the Berry (1929). Taken from the
folk saying “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the
juice,” the title is ironic, for the novel is an attack
on prejudice within the race. Emma Lou, the pro-
tagonist, is a dark-skinned girl from Boise who is
looked down on by her fairer family members and
friends. When she attends the University of South-
ern California, she again is scorned; she travels to
Harlem, believing she will not be snubbed because
of her dark color. However, like the Williamses in
Harlem and like Thurman in his own life, Emma
Lou is disillusioned by the city. She becomes un-
happy with her work, her love affairs, and the
pronounced discrimination she experiences in
the nightclubs, where lighter-skinned females star
in extravagant productions while darker-skinned
performers are forced to sing offstage. She uses
hair straighteners and skin bleachers and takes on
the appearance and attitudes of the fairer-skinned
people who degrade her, and ironically she snubs
darker men, whom she considers inferior. She
dates light-skinned Alva, who is cruel and verbally
abusive, but when she accidentally catches him in
a homosexual embrace, Emma Lou awakens to her
life of contradiction and hypocrisy.
Although critics praised Thurman for devoting
a novel to the plight of a dark-skinned heroine,
they criticized him for being too objective. Thur-
man, they argued, had failed to judge critically the
world in which Emma Lou lived. They also criti-
cized Thurman for trying to do too much with
The Blacker the Berry, accusing him of crafting a
choppy and occasionally incoherent narrative by
touching on too many themes.
Also set in Harlem, Thurman’s second novel,
Infants of the Spring (1932), revolves around Ray-
mond Taylor, a young black author who is trying to
write a weighty novel in a decadent, race-oriented
atmosphere. Taylor resides in a boardinghouse,
nicknamed “Niggerati Manor,” with a number of
young blacks who pretend to be aspiring authors.
Thurman makes these pretenders the major vic-
tims of his satire, suggesting that they have de-
stroyed their creativity by leading decadent lives.
Critics considered Infants of the Spring one of
the first books written expressly for black audi-
ences and not white critics and contended that
Thurman based his characters on well-known fig-
ures of the Harlem Renaissance, including Hughes,
Locke, Hurston, COUNTEE CULLEN, Nugent, and
Aaron Douglas. As they did with The Blacker the
Berry, reviewers objected to Thurman’s examining
too many issues. Unlike his first novel, which wasThurman, Wallace 497