viii Encyclopedia of the Harlem Literary Renaissance
major journals and their contributors. These newly
assembled volumes of primary writings offer absorb-
ing perspectives on the meaningful and substantial
forums that W. E. B. DuBois, Jessie Fauset, Charles
Johnson, Chandler Owen, A. Philip Randolph, and
others generated for creative production and polit-
ical self-expression. Publications such as Sondra
Wilson’s anthologies of writings published in The
Crisis, The Messenger,and Opportunity,respectively,
Lionel Bascom’s A Renaissance in Harlem: Lost
Essays of the WPA, by Ralph Ellison, Dorothy West,
and Other Voices of a Generation (2001), Craig
Gable’s Ebony Rising: Short Fiction of the Greater
Harlem Renaissance Era(2004), Marcy Knox’s The
Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women
(1993), and Lorraine Elena Roses and Ruth
Elizabeth Randolph’s, Harlem’s Glory: Black Women
Writing, 1900–1950 (1996) continue to provide
scholars with new primary materials with which to
reconsider the scope, mission, and intensity of the
Harlem Renaissance. In addition, biographies such
as Valerie Boyd’s Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of
Zora Neale Hurston (2003), Christine Rauchfuss
Gray’s comprehensive study, Willis Richardson:
Forgotten Pioneer of African-American Drama
(1999), David Levering Lewis’s double Pulitzer
Prize-winning volumes on W. E. B. DuBois, and
Thadious Davis’s biography of Nella Larsen not
only reveal the prolific, seemingly irrepressible
energy and vision of the movement but also per-
form vital acts of literary recovery that re-introduce
figures whose names might be familiar but whose
circumstances, backgrounds, and lives continue to
warrant scrupulous reconstruction and nuanced
examination.
This book includes references to many
women writers, those who have come to be
regarded as definitive examples of the feminist lit-
erary enterprise of the day as well as many who
have existed on the fringes of Harlem Renaissance
studies. The information presented here owes
much to the scholarship and intellectual rigor of
individuals such as Elizabeth Brown-Guillory,
Marcy Knox, Kathy Perkins, Lorraine Elena Roses,
Ruth Elizabeth Randolph, Alice Walker, and
Sondra Wilson. These and other scholars have
been determined to honor the influence, efforts,
and successes of writers whose productivity rangedfrom the publication of several poems to the
founding of journals.
The landmark act of Harlem Renaissance-
related feminist recovery is, for many, Alice
Walker’s much-heralded and documented commit-
ment to mark the life and writings of Zora Neale
Hurston. Walker’s tireless efforts, which culminat-
ed in a challenging and decisive act of placing a
tombstone on the long-neglected Florida grave of
the writer, have encouraged many to emulate her
passionate and unapologetic pursuit of figures with-
out whom our understanding of the period contin-
ues to be incomplete. Roses and Randolph note
that they were compelled to correct enduring “male
literary myopia” that accommodated notions that
the Harlem Renaissance was “primarily a male
event” and to catalog the long-obscured women,
some of whom “were so undocumented that it was
a challenge to verify that they had ever existed.”
(Roses 4, 5) In addition to the biographical profiles
of women writers and discussions of their works,
the volume also includes some brief entries that sig-
nal the still elusive nature of some works and fig-
ures. These are incorporated here in an effort to
mark a place, however tenuous, for both the
authors and the writings.
Scholars continue to debate which years mark
the beginning and end of the Harlem Renaissance.
Many critics agree that the period spanned the
1920s and ended with the onset of the Great
Depression. Historian Nathan Huggins has sug-
gested that the Renaissance began as early as 1914,
while scholars David Levering Lewis and Bruce
Kellner use central political events such as the
1917 silent march through Harlem and the 1935
Harlem Riot to frame the period. Victor Kramer
and Robert Russ suggest that the Harlem
Renaissance should not be regarded as a move-
ment that spanned only the decades of the 1920s
and 1930s. They argue that its influences and its
principal writers have informed American and
African-American literary and cultural studies well
into the late 20th century.
This volume acknowledges the ongoing debate
about the life span of the movement. While it uses
1920 to 1940 as its primary chronological guide, it
includes references to relevant works and events
that occurred before and after those dates. The