ventive nature. A light-skinned man, he did exper-
iment with passing as white but did not pursue this
for any extended period of time. One especially
memorable anecdote features him, his good friend
LANGSTON HUGHES, and WARING CUNEY
strolling through the streets of Washington, D.C.,
pretending to be mysterious foreigners and speak-
ing gibberish to each other.
Nugent enjoyed a close and supportive
friendship with Langston Hughes, whom he met
at one of the literary salons hosted by GEORGIA
DOUGLASJOHNSON, the Washington, D.C., poet
and mentor. It was Hughes who retrieved a dis-
carded poem of Nugent’s that eventually became
the writer’s first published poem when it appeared
in OPPORTUNITY.He wrote his first short story,
“Sadhji” (1925) in response to a request from
ALAINLOCKEwho wanted a narrative to accom-
pany a Nugent sketch of an African woman.
Locke included the work in his pioneering 1925
anthology, THE NEW NEGRO. Two years later,
Locke and his HOWARDUNIVERSITYcolleague T.
MONTGOMERYGREGORYincluded a revised and
dramatic version of the work in PLAYS OFNEGRO
LIFE:A SOURCE-BOOK OF NATIVEAMERICAN
DRAMA(1927), their acclaimed anthology. “Sad-
hji” was subsequently performed as a one-act bal-
let in 1932 at the Eastman School of Music in
Rochester, New York.
Nugent was part of the enterprising set of
young emerging and insurgent writers and artists of
the Harlem Renaissance. He collaborated with
Hughes, WALLACE THURMAN, with whom he
shared an apartment at 267 West 136th Street, the
boarding house populated with artists and writers
and nicknamed NIGGERATIManor, for two years,
and ZORANEALEHURSTONon FIRE!!,the short-
lived journal produced in 1926. His short story in
the first and only issue of Fire!! was entitled
“SMOKE,LILIES, ANDJADE.” It was the first narra-
tive of the period to feature openly homosexual
themes. Nugent continued to work with Thurman,
one of the most visionary and energetic figures of
the Harlem Renaissance. He collaborated with
Thurman and worked as associate editor of
HARLEM:A FORUM OF NEGRO LIFE. Unfortu-
nately, that journal, to which Nugent contributed
theater reviews, also suffered from financial woes
and ceased publication after its first issue appeared
in November 1928. Nugent inspired Thurman’s
character Paul Arbian, the artist and writer in his
second and last novel, INFANTS OF THESPRING
(1932).
He also collaborated with AARONDOUGLAS
at a time when the acclaimed artist was designing
murals for Harlem nightclubs. Other colleagues
and collaborators included GWENDOLYNBENNETT
and DOROTHYWEST.
Nugent inherited his parents’ flair for perfor-
mance. He auditioned and was chosen to be in
the cast of the 1929 and 1930 productions of
DUBOSEHEYWARD’s PORGY.In 1933 he appeared
as a dancer in Run, Little Chillun,a drama by Hall
Johnson that ran on BROADWAYfor four months
before going on tour. In the years after the Harlem
Renaissance ended, he also joined the Negro Bal-
let Company, a troupe founded in 1939 by Wilson
Williams.
Like RICHARD WRIGHT, Zora Neale Hur-
ston, and others, Nugent contributed to the Fed-
eral Writers’ Project during the 1930s. He
worked with Roi Ottley and compiled numerous
biographical profiles of African Americans in
New York City. Nugent published frequently in
diverse publications of the Harlem Renaissance.
His fiction, poems, and drawings appeared in The
Crisis, the Dorothy West journals CHALLENGE
and NEWCHALLENGE,PALMS, Topaz,and Trend.
With HAROLDJACKMAN, he served as executor
for the estate of L. S. Alexander Gumby, the avid
book collector who had ambitious plans to pro-
duce the GUMBYBOOKSTUDIOQUARTERLY, a
literary journal.Bibliography
Garber, Eric. “Richard Bruce Nugent.” In Dictionary of
Literary Biography.Vol. 51, edited by Trudier Harris
and Thaddeus Davis. Detroit: Gate, 1987.
Lewis, David Levering, When Harlem Was in Vogue.New
York: Knopf, 1981.
McBreen, Ellen. “Biblical Gender Bending in Harlem:
The Queer Performance of Nugent’s Salome,” Art
Journal 57, no. 3 (fall 1998): 22–28.
Nugent, Richard Bruce. “Sadhji.” In The New Negro,
edited by Alain LeRoy Locke. New York: Boni,- 113–114.
———. “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade.” Fire!!(November
1926), 405–408.
Nugent, Richard Bruce 397