Harlem Renaissance Literature

Encompasses the poetry, fiction, and non-fiction written by Black American writers during the early
twentieth century. During the Harlem Renaissance movement, Black writers created work that
celebrated Black culture and folklore. Harlem Renaissance writers also openly explored the hardships
endured by Black people during slavery as well as during Jim Crow-era segregation in the United States.

The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual, cultural, and artistic movement that centered around the
Black American experience and spanned from the 1910s to the 1930s. While it was rooted in the Harlem
neighborhood of New York City, Black American writers, musicians, and artists contributed from across
the country.

Brief History of Harlem Renaissance Literature:

The Great Migration: During World War I, Black Americans began moving out of the Southern United
States and relocating to the West, Midwest, and Northeast. By 1920, hundreds of thousands of Black
people had moved from the South to new areas, including neighborhoods like Harlem in New York City.

New publishing opportunities: In 1917, Marcus Garvey, an immigrant from Jamaica, founded the first
chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem. Garvey contributed to the
organization’s weekly newspaper, The Negro World, which promoted racial pride and celebrated Black
American culture. More organizations like the National Urban League and the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) formed print magazines and publications, creating new
opportunities for writers to share their work.

Writers in Harlem: By the late 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing, with Black American
artists creating a vast range of work. Black poets, authors, and essayists wrote thousands of pieces that
helped lay the framework for the civil rights movement to follow decades later.

Notable Harlem Renaissance Writers and Poets

Claude McKay (1889–1948)

Claude McKay moved to Harlem in 1914 and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance
movement. One of Claude McKay’s first novels, Home to Harlem (1928), follows a young soldier who
deserts his army position during World War I and lands in Harlem. His poem “If We Must Die” (1919)
was published in the magazine The Liberator, which he co-edited for a brief time.

Langston Hughes (1901–1967): One of the most prolific poets of the Harlem Renaissance movement,
Langston Hughes published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, in 1926. Hughes often contributed
to the National Urban League’s magazine, Opportunity. Although he predominantly wrote poetry, he
also wrote essays, including an influential piece called “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”
(1926).

Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961): Jessie Redmon Fauset began her career writing for the NAACP’s
magazine, The Crisis, which was founded by W.E.B. Du Bois. After a few years, she became the
magazine’s literary editor, working alongside other Harlem Renaissance writers like Anne Spencer, Alice
Dunbar Nelson, Arna Bontemps, and Gwendolyn Bennett. Her first novel, there is Confusion (1924),
received widespread acclaim.

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938): James Weldon Johnson was a writer and activist best known for
his poem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which was set to music by his brother and adopted as the official
song of the NAACP in 1919.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960): Writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston grew up in Alabama.
She moved to Harlem in the 1920s and wrote for a literary magazine called Fire!! that was edited by
Wallace Thurman. Her most popular novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), dives into themes of
race and gender roles as it follows the life of a woman in Florida during the early twentieth century.

Alain Locke (1885–1954): Writer, philosopher, and educator Alain Locke became the first Black Rhodes
scholar in 1907. Nearly two decades later, he compiled a highly influential anthology called The New
Negro (1925), which contained works from prominent Harlem Renaissance intellectuals and writers like
Jean Toomer, Langstone Hughes, and Countee Cullen.

The Harlem Renaissance was an African-American artistic and intellectual movement that

flourished throughout the 1920s. The Harlem Renaissance marked a cultural period during the

1920’s when African-Americans celebrated their heritage through music, art, literature, politics

and social movements. Harlem in the 1920s was like nowhere else on Earth. During World

War I (1914-18), a mass movement called the Great Migration, an exodus of 6 million blacks

from the South to Northern cities like New York, Chicago, and Detroit (1916-70), began

bringing African-Americans by the tens of thousands from the rural South to Northern cities.

The movement was based in Harlem, New York, but its influence extended throughout the

nation and even the world. Following the Civil War, large numbers of African-Americans

migrated to northern urban areas, like New York and Chicago. Harlem was one of the prime

destinations for many black Americans, and there, a distinct way of life developed.

'The New Negro Movement,' as it was called during its time, the Harlem Renaissance was

essentially the flowering of a unique African-American culture. African-American writers,

poets, artists, musicians and intellectuals found new ways to express pride in their race and

culture. Central to the Harlem Renaissance was the concept that the time had come for
AfricanAmericans to take their rightful place in society and contribute to culture in meaningful ways.

Although the movement peaked throughout the late 1920s, its impact continued into the 1930s

and beyond.

Among the new arrivals was a whole generation of young writers and thinkers. “Harlem was like
a great magnet for the Negro intellectual, pulling him from everywhere,” Langston Hughes

wrote. As a group, they began writing with a bold new voice about what it meant to be a black

American.

“At the beginning of the 20th century, black people were believed to have no history or culture,”

said scholar Howard Dodson Jr. For many Americans, the Harlem Renaissance was the first clue

that they were wrong.

Langston Hughes (1901-1967)

Born in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes moved around a lot as a child until his family settled in
Cleveland, Ohio. He wrote his first and most famous poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” soon after
graduating from high school. While studying at Columbia University in New York City, he embraced
Harlem culture, especially the popular jazz and blues music that he later incorporated so memorably
into his work beginning with his first collection, The Weary Blues (1926). As the most influential and
widely celebrated voice of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes also wrote essays, novels, short stories and
plays, all of which centered and celebrated Black life and pride in African American heritage.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

AUTHOR ZORA NEALE HURSTON (1891-1960). 

After growing up in rural Alabama and Florida, Zora Neale Hurston attended Howard University and won
a scholarship to Barnard College in 1925, which brought her into the heart of Harlem culture. A trained
anthropologist who traveled to Haiti and Jamaica for research, Hurston gained attention in the 1930s for
her collection of African American folktales, Of Mules and Men (1935) and her 1937 novel Their Eyes
Were Watching God, about the tumultuous life of a Black woman in the rural South. Though Hurston
struggled to make a living as a writer during her lifetime, interest in her work revived after her death,
when Their Eyes Were Watching God was celebrated as a literary classic and one of the greatest works
of the Harlem Renaissance.

3. Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

Portrait of Countee Cullen (1903-1946), African American poet and one of the leaders of the Harlem
Renaissance in the 1920s.

COUNTEE CULLEN (1903-1946).

The Kentucky-born Countee Porter was unofficially adopted at age 15 by F.A. Cullen, minister of a
leading Methodist church in Harlem. While attending New York University, Countee Cullen began
publishing his poems in The Crisis, the literary magazine of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) co-founded by W.E.B. Du Bois, and elsewhere. He soon won a
scholarship to Harvard, and won widespread acclaim for his debut poetry collection, Colors (1925).
Unlike Hughes, who wrote in his famous essay “The Negro Artist and His Racial Mountain” that Black
poets should combat the “urge within the race toward whiteness,” Cullen was unapologetically
influenced in his work by Romantic poets like John Keats. After his poetic reputation waned in the 1930s,
Cullen taught for years in New York City public schools.

4. Claude McKay (1889-1948)

Born in Jamaica, Claude McKay came to the United States to attend college, but left school in 1914 and
settled in Harlem. After publishing “If We Must Die,” one of his best-known poems, in 1919 he traveled
in Europe and lived in London, returning to the United States in 1921. McKay’s collection Harlem
Shadows (1922) established him as a major voice of the Harlem Renaissance and an influence on
younger writers like Hughes. After his novel Home to Harlem (1928), about a young army deserter
during World War I, became the first commercially successful novel by a Black writer, McKay followed
up with two more novels, Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933). A supporter of communism in the
1920s, McKay traveled to the Soviet Union and lived in France. Later in his life, he converted to
Catholicism and settled in Chicago, where he worked as a teacher for Catholic organizations.

5. Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961)

Poet and Critic Jessie Redmon Fauset, circa 1920.

POET AND CRITIC JESSIE REDMON FAUSET, CIRCA 1920.

A 1905 graduate of Cornell University (where she was possibly the first Black female student), Jessie
Redmon Fauset was working as a teacher when she began writing for The Crisis. In 1919, she moved to
New York to become the magazine’s literary editor, helping to introduce writers such as Cullen, Hughes
and McKay to national audiences. In addition to promoting the work of other important writers, Fauset
continued to publish her own poetry and short fiction in the magazine, as well as four novels, including
There is Confusion (1924) and Plum Bun (1929), which chronicled the lives and culture of the emerging
Black middle class.

6. Jean Toomer (1894-1967)

Jean Toomer, author, essayist, and psychologist, circa 1934.

JEAN TOOMER, AUTHOR, ESSAYIST, AND PSYCHOLOGIST, CIRCA 1934.

Born in Washington, D.C., Jean Toomer came from a family with both white and Black heritage, and his
grandfather had been the first Black governor in the United States during Reconstruction. After
attending the City College of New York, Toomer wrote poetry and prose for several years, then moved to
Georgia in 1921 to take a teaching job. The experience of returning to his family’s Southern roots
inspired his novel Cane (1923), an experimental hybrid of fiction prose, dramatic dialogue and poetry
that was hailed as an important example of literary modernism. Toomer embraced the spiritual
teachings of the influential philosopher George Gurdjieff, and taught workshops in Harlem and
elsewhere. While he continued to write, his later work failed to find an audience. He later adopted the
Quaker religion, and lived as a recluse in the years before his death.

7. Nella Larsen (1891-1964)

Nella Larsen, (1895-1964), American novelist, nurse and librarian.

NELLA LARSEN, (1895-1964), AMERICAN NOVELIST, NURSE AND LIBRARIAN.

The daughter of a white mother from Denmark and a Black West Indian father, Nella Larsen was raised
in a mostly white environment in Chicago after her father disappeared and her mother remarried a
white Danish man. She studied nursing at a school in the Bronx created to train Black nurses, and
returned to work there in 1916. Alongside her husband, the prominent Black physicist Elmer Imes,
Larsen joined Harlem’s flourishing intellectual and cultural circles; she later graduated from the teaching
program at the New York Public Library. In 1928, she published the autobiographical novel Quicksand,
followed by Passing (1929), both of which featured mixed-race protagonists and complicated dynamics
of urban life, race consciousness and sexuality. Larsen became the first Black woman to win a
Guggenheim fellowship in 1930, but plagiarism accusations and a disintegrating marriage soon helped
derail her literary career. She eventually stopped publishing and went back to nursing in the later decad