Mae Cowdery publishes We Lift Our Voices and
Other Poems, her only Harlem Renaissance–era
volume of poetry.
1937
Zora Neale Hurston publishes Their Eyes Were
Watching God.
Claude McKay publishes A Long Way from
Home,his autobiography.
Idabelle Yeiser publishes Moods: A Book of
Verse,her first collection of poems.
Dorothy West begins editing New Challenge,
her second journal.
1938
Mercedes Gilbert publishes Aunt Sara’s Wooden
God,her first and only novel.
Langston Hughes establishes the Harlem Suit-
case Theater.
Beatrice Campbell Murphy publishes Negro
Voices: An Anthology of Contemporary Verse,one of
the few collections of poetry edited by a woman
during the Harlem Renaissance.
Richard Wright publishes Uncle Tom’s Chil-
dren: Four Novellas.
National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People officer, writer, and diplomat James
Weldon Johnson passes away.
Renowned bibliophile and collector Arthur
Schomburg passes away.
1939
Arna Bontemps publishes Drums at Dusk,a novel
about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revo-
lution.
Zora Neale Hurston publishes Moses, Man of
the Mountain.
Ida Rowland, the first African-American wo-
man from Oklahoma to earn a Ph.D., publishes
Lisping Leaves,her first volume of poems.
William Attaway publishes Let Me Breathe
Thunder(1939), his first novel.
J. Saunders Redding publishes To Make a Poet
Black,his only Harlem Renaissance–era volume
and a highly respected work of American literary
history and criticism.
Marian Anderson, the legendary contralto, is
denied access by the Daughters of the American
Revolution to Constitution Hall. She delivers a
historic concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memo-
rial as a result of intervention by Eleanor Roosevelt
and others.
Joel Spingarn, longtime National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People member,
passes away.
Garland Anderson, pioneering playwright,
passes away.1940
Claude McKay publishes Harlem: Negro Metropolis,
a cultural overview of Harlem and its dynamic arts
and culture community.
Langston Hughes publishes The Big Sea: An
Autobiography, the first of his two published
memoirs.
Jane Harris Hunter, a civil rights leader and an
officer in the National Association of Colored
Women, publishes A Nickel and a Prayer,her auto-
biography.
Mary Effie Lee Newsome publishes Gladiola
Gardens: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second
Graders.The volume includes illustrations by the
celebrated painter Lois Mailou Jones.
Countee Cullen publishes The Lost Zoo (A
Rhyme for the Young, but Not Too Young),one of his
two volumes of poetry for children.
Mary Church Terrell publishes her autobiogra-
phy, A Colored Woman in a White World.
Richard Wright publishes Native Son,a novel
that reinforces the end of the Harlem Renais-
sance and the turn toward American literary
modernism.
Marcus Garvey passes away in England.
DuBose Heyward, author of Porgy,passes away.
Robert Abbott, founder and editor of the in-
fluential Chicago Defender,passes away.
Robert Vann, longtime editor of the respected
Pittsburgh Courier,passes away.586 Encyclopedia of the Harlem Literary Renaissance