Introduction viiand collaborator William Jourdan Rapp that if he
remained in New York City, “no work would be
done” (Thurman 149). While some, like
Thurman, departed from the city in order to pre-
serve their creative genius, others like Georgia
Douglas Johnson and Eugene Gordon established
well-known and nurturing literary communities in
other urban centers. Johnson’s Washington, D.C.,
salon, Gordon’s productive Boston literary club
known as the Saturday Evening Quill Club, and
the Black Opals of Philadelphia represented some
of the best-known East Coast centers of literary
activity. It was with poet Georgia Douglas Johnson
that Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Alain Locke, and oth-
ers delighted regularly in “much poetry and dis-
cussion and salad and wine and tea” (Hull 185).
Lesser known but equally valuable Harlem
Renaissance communities flourished as far away as
Texas, the Midwest, and throughout the West.
Writers such as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes,
and Nella Larsen were among the many whose
work was enriched from time spent in dynamic
and transitory expatriate communities abroad in
countries such as France, Morocco, Russia, and
Portugal.
Many of the individuals associated with the
Harlem Renaissance became part of a larger move-
ment to showcase black culture and to overcome
the oppressive racial politics of the day. Yet, as
much of the correspondence and primary works
reveal, writers of color dealt with the racial impera-
tives and realities of their time in different ways.
Some, like Jean Toomer, openly defied the auto-
matic racial categorization of their work and selves.
Others, like Arna Bontemps and Jessie Fauset, were
committed to providing children of African descent
with vivid, regal, and grounding literature that
inspired and educated them to transcend the nar-
row and stultifying effects of Jim Crow segregation
and misleading, or simply nonexistent, accounts of
African-American culture and African history. The
unrelenting federal scrutiny of individuals such as
W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, A. Philip
Randolph, and Paul Robeson raised the stakes of
the Renaissance. While this was the period of many
celebrated landmark events such as the staging of
the first African-American play on Broadway, it
also was the period in which many had occasion to
rally to protest lynching, to support innocent vic-
tims such as the Scottsboro Boys, and to examine
their support for or distance from the women and
men among them who regarded language and per-
formance as powerful tools with which to achieve
literary and political emancipation.
This volume benefits enormously from the
recent renaissance in African-American literature
and scholarship that has made available a stunning
array of primary works by well-known and long-lost
figures of the Harlem Renaissance period. Access to
primary works energizes any critical field of study,
and a number of recent anthologies, collections of
letters, and volumes of collected works have further
rejuvenated the fields of African-American and
American studies. Scholars continue to build on
the pioneering work of literary reconstruction
begun by scholars such as James Hatch, Nathan
Huggins, Bruce Kellner, David Levering Lewis,
Kathy Perkins, Ann Allen Shockley, Ted Shine, and
Mary Helen Washington, all of whom have demon-
strated the undeniable allure of this literary period,
its debt to the viable African-American tradition
that began in the 18th century, and its formative
influence on contemporary African-American writ-
ing. Recently edited volumes such as Emily
Bernard’s Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of
Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten(2001), Carla
Kaplan’s Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters
(2002), William Maxwell’s Complete Poems: Claude
McKay(2004), Amritjit Singh and Daniel Scott’s
The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A
Harlem Renaissance Reader(2003), Thomas Wirth’s
Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from
the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent(2002), and the
multivolume series initiated by Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., and Jennifer Burton dedicated to the writings of
African-American women writers from 1910
through 1940, shed new light on the fellowship,
tensions, and inspiring literary production that
were at the core of the movement.
The recent intense scholarly production and
research in the field has resulted in the republica-
tion of a diverse number of materials that have long
been obscured or otherwise unavailable. This refer-
ence guide acknowledges and incorporates many of
these new works and groundbreaking scholarly
finds in its presentation of the Harlem Renaissance.
It is informed by the invaluable work of scholars
who have provided deliberate reconsiderations of