Harlem Renaissance

James Baldwin (1924-1987)

Most of Baldwin's work deals with racial and sexual issues in the mid-20th century United States. His work is notable for the deeply personal - even courageous - way in which he explores questions of identity and meaning. His novels mime all the complex, social and psychological pressures related to being both black and homosexual at a time well before the social, cultural or political equality of these groups could be assumed.

His most important works are Notes on a Native Son (essays) and Go Tell it On the Mountain.

Go Tell it on the Mountain examines the role of the Christian Church in the lives of African-Americans, both as a source of repression and moral hypocrisy and as a source of inspiration and community. It also, more subtly, examines racism in the United States. The protagonist is John Grimes.

Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

Countee Cullen was an American poet, one of the finest of the Harlem Renaissance. His most famous poems are "Yet Do I Marvel" and "Incident", the latter of which describes a childhood trip to Baltimore marred by a racial slur. Countee Cullen was raised and educated in a primarily white community. Countee Cullen differed from many other poets of the Harlem Renaissance because he lacked the background to comment from personal experience on the lives of other blacks or use popular black themes in his writing.

“Yet do I Marvel” (Note that this is a Shakespearean sonnet)

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

“ Incident ”
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.

Ralph Ellison (1914-1994)

Ellison's most famous work is Invisible Man, which explores the theme of man’s search for his identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of a black man in the New York City of the 1940’s. In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison created characters who are dispassionate, educated, articulate and self-aware. Through the protagonist, Ellison explores the contrasts between the Northern and Southern varieties of racism and their alienating effect. The narrator is "invisible" in a figurative sense, in that "people refuse to see" him, and also experiences a kind of dissociation.

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Like many writers of the post-WWI era, such as Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, Hughes spent time in Paris during the early 1920s. For most of 1924 he lived at 15 Rue de Nollet. In November 1924 Hughes moved to Washington D.C. His first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926. In 1929 he graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. In 1930, his first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon gold medal for literature. Hughes, who claimed Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the 1920s through the 1960s. Much of his writing was inspired by the blues and jazz of that era; an example is "Montage of a Dream Deferred", from which a line was taken for the title of the play Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry.

" Montage of a Dream Deferred "

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--

And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?
other poetry

Many of his poems are in the form of blues lyrics, such as the opening verse to " Po' Boy Blues ":

When I was home de
Sunshine seemed like gold.
When I was home de
Sunshine seemed like gold.
Since I come up North de
Whole damn world's turned cold.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

Her most famous work is Their Eyes Were Watching God. The main character, Janie, embarks on an epic journey. Her search for self-fufillment as a woman and as an African-American is paralleled with that of Odysseus as her journey takes her far and wide and pits her against the forces of nature and "monsters" that try to stop her from reaching self-actualization:

The main character, a black woman in her early forties named Janie Crawford, tells the story of her life and journey via an extended flashback to her best friend, Pheoby. Her life has three major periods corresponding to her marriages to three men.

Janie's grandmother, Nanny, was a slave who was impregnated by a white man (Hurston implies that it was the slaveowner) and gave birth to a daughter. That daughter was raped as a teenager and became pregnant with Janie, but left Janie with Nanny and is not present in the novel. Nanny sees Janie kissing a neighborhood boy and fears that Janie will become a "mule" to some man, so she arranges for Janie to marry Logan Killick s, an older man and farmer who is looking for a wife to keep his home and help on the farm. Janie has the idea that marriage must involve love, forged in a pivotal early scene where she sees bees pollinating a pear tree and believes that marriage is the human equivalent to this natural process. Logan Killicks, however, wants a domestic helper rather than a lover or partner, and after he begins to hit Janie and to try to force her to help him with the hard labor of the farm, Janie runs off with the glib Joe (Jody) Starks, who takes her to Eatonville (which in reality was Hurston's hometown).

Starks arrives in Eatonville (the United States's first all-black community) to find the residents devoid of ambition, so he arranges to buy more land from the neighboring landowner, hires some local residents to build a general store for him to own and run, and has himself appointed mayor. Janie soon realizes that Joe wants her as a trophy. He wants the image of his perfect wife to reinforce his powerful position in town, as he asks her to run the store but forbids her from participating in the substantial social life that occurs on the store's front porch.

After Starks dies, Janie finds herself financially independent and beset with suitors, some of whom are men of some means or have prestigious occupations, but she falls in love with a drifter and gambler named Tea Cake. She sells the store and the two head to Jacksonville and get married, only to move to the Everglades region soon after for Tea Cake to find work planting and harvesting beans. While their relationship has its ups and downs, including mutual bouts of jealousy, Janie now has the marriage with love that she had wanted.

The area is hit with a hurricane, and while Tea Cake and Janie survive it, Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog while saving Janie from drowning. He contracts the disease himself. He ultimately tries to shoot Janie with his pistol, but she shoots him with a rifle in self-defense. She is charged with murder. At the trial, Tea Cake's black, male friends show up to oppose her, while a group of local white women is there to support her. The all-white jury acquits Janie, and she returns to Eatonville, only to find the residents gossiping about her and assuming (or perhaps wishing) that Tea Cake has run off with her money.

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)

James Weldon Johnson was a leading African American author, poet, early civil rights activist, and prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Jacksonville, Florida, he was the first African American accepted to the Florida bar. He served in several public capacities, including as consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua, but he is best remembered today for his writing, which included novels, poems, and collections of folklore.

His first major literary sensation was The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), a fictional account of a light-skinned black man's attempts to succeed and survive in the early 20th century. It was while serving as executive secretary of the NAACP from 1920 through 1931 that he released God's Trombones, Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, one of the works he is best remembered for today

Richard Wright (1908-1960)

The grandson of slaves, Wright became a respected author, best known for his novel Native Son (1940). It tells the story of Bigger Thomas, an African-American of the poorest class, struggling to live in the Chicago, Illinois of the 1930s. His life, however, is doomed from the outset: after Bigger accidentally kills a white woman, he runs from the police, kills his girlfriend and is then caught and tried.

Wright is also renowned for the semi-autobiographical Black Boy (1945), which describes his early life from Roxie through his move to Chicago, his clashes with his Seventh-day Adventist family, his difficulties with white employers and social isolation.

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