Works by
Wallace Thurman
(Writer)
[1902 - 1934]

• Negro Life in New York's Harlem: A Lively Picture of a Popular and Interesting Section (1927)

• Harlem (1929)
  Play

• Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929)
  One of the most widely read and controversial works of the Harlem Renaissance, The Blacker the Berry...was the first novel to openly explore prejudice within the Black community. This pioneering novel found a way beyond the bondage of Blackness in American life to a new meaning in truth and beauty. Emma Lou Brown's dark complexion is a source of sorrow and humiliation -- not only to herself, but to her lighter-skinned family and friends and to the white community of Boise, Idaho, her home-town. As a young woman, Emma travels to New York's Harlem, hoping to find a safe haven in the Black Mecca of the 1920s. Wallace Thurman re-creates this legendary time and place in rich detail, describing Emma's visits to nightclubs and dance halls and house-rent parties, her sex life and her catastrophic love affairs, her dreams and her disillusions -- and the momentous decision she makes in order to survive.

  A lost classic of Black American literature, The Blacker the Berry...is a compelling portrait of the destructive depth of racial bias in this country. A new introduction by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, author of The Sweeter the Juice, highlights the timelessness of the issues of race and skin color in America.

• Infants of the Spring (1931)
  It's 1920s Harlem, and man, the joint is jumpin'. Folks are coming and going and everything's copacetic as long as the gin keeps flowing. This is the scene Stephen Jorgenson dives into when he arrives from Canada for the first time. He is taken to "The Niggerati Manor," an apartment building in Harlem inhabited by aspiring artists whose  true talents lie in living, and where everything's black and white--with a lot of grayness in between. Counterbalancing Stephen's embrace of these folks is Raymond Taylor, a writer who is the only truly talented artist in the manor. Raymond's cynical take on the "new Negro artist" is the tightrope he walks between the love and hatred of himself and his people. Characters representing Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alain Locke all appear, and part of the fun of this book is figuring out who's who.

See also:

• Fire!! a Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists (1926)
  FIRE!! was one of the most important publications of the Harlem Renaissance. It was created in 1926 by a young group of African American artists and writers.

• Wallace Thurman's Harlem Renaissance (1994) by Eleonore Van Notten
  Wallace Thurman (1902-1934) played a pivotal role in creating and defining the Harlem Renaissance. Thurman's complicated life as a black writer is described here for the first time: from his birth in Salt Lake City, Utah; through his quixotic and spotty education; to his arrival and residence in New York City at the height of the New Negro Movement in Harlem. Seen as it often is through the life of Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance is celebrated as a highly successful Afro-centrist achievement. Seen from Thurman's perspective, as set against the historical and cultural background of the Jazz Age, the accomplishments of the Harlem Renaissance appear more qualified and more equivocal. In Thurman's view the Harlem Renaissance's failure to live up to its initial promise resulted from an ideological underpinning which was overwhelmingly concerned with race. He felt that the movement's self-consciousness and faddism compromised the aesthetic standards of many of its writers and artists, including his own.

• The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader (2003), Amritjit Singh and Daniel M. Scott III, eds.
  This book is the definitive collection of the writings of Wallace Thurman (1902–1934), providing a comprehensive anthology of both the published and unpublished works of this bohemian, bisexual writer. Widely regarded as the enfant terrible of the Harlem Renaissance, Thurman was a leader among a group of young artists and intellectuals that included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas. Through the publication of magazines such as Fire!! and Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life, Thurman tried to organize the younger generation against the ideologies of the older generation of black leaders and intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Benjamin Brawley. Thurman also left a permanent mark on the period through his prolific work as a novelist, playwright, short story writer, and literary critic.
  
  This collection brings together all of Thurman’s essays, nearly all of his letters to black and white figures of the 1920s, and three previously unpublished major works: Aunt Hagar’s Children, which is a collection of essays, and two full-length plays, Harlem and Jeremiah the Magnificent. The introduction provides a challenging new reevaluation of Thurman and the Harlem Renaissance for both the general reader and scholar.