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ton — to tne contemporary — ice-1 the past elected official in 1641 as a repre- the future.”New anthologies from Harlem’s ’20s RenaissanceBy Nancy Pate Orlando SentinelNow 87, Dorothy West author ofthe new novel ‘‘The Wedding,” is the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, that extraordinary flowering of African-American arts and letters of the 1920s and '30s. A prolific writer, West was close friends with other young writers associated with the important cultural movement including Zora Neale Hurston, poet Countee Cullen and poet playwright and novelist Langston Hughes.It was Hughes, considered the poet laureate of Harlem, who in 1926 issued something of a call to arms to his fellow black artists with his essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” In it he wrote that ‘‘the road for the serious black artist... who would produce a racial art is most certainly rocky and the mountain is high,” but that it was the duty of that artist to takepride in his or her racial heri tage: The standard history of the Harlem Renaissance is David Levering Lewis’ 1981 book “When Harlem Was in Vogue,” its title a takeoff on another Hughes’ essay, “When the Negro Was in Vogue.” Lewis also edited a recent anthology, “The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader” (Viking, $27.95,766 pages), which along with the 1994 collection “Classic Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance,” edited by William L. Andrews (Oxford University Press, $18.95, paperback,403 pages), offers readers a good introduction to the era’s writers. Coincidentally, both books use the same painting on their covers — Archibald I. Motley Jr.’s vibrant 1929 ©a, “Blues.”“The Harlem Renaissance Reader” is the more comprehensi ve of the two volumes, beginning with its introduction by Lewis — a minihistory of the “New Negro Arts Movement” from its beginnings at theend of World War I to its decline during the Great Depression. Here are defining essays by the movement’s founders — W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Charles S. Johnson and James Weldon Johnson. Here, too, are poems by Hughes, Cullen, Gwendolyn Bennett and Claude McKay, among others, and fiction by Hurston, Hughes,''Jean Toomer and Wallace Thurman. Dorothy West is represented by her first published short story, “The Typewriter,” written when she was. 18.But the book also offers some surprises: Paul Robeson reflecting on Eugene O’Neill’s plays and an excerpt from O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones.” In reply to those who wanted Robeson to play “a truly heroic and noble role... the finest type of Negro,” the actor wrote that he never expected to portray “a more heroically tragic figure than ‘Brutus Jones, Emperor’ not excepting ‘Othello.’”There’s some overlap betweenLewis’ anthology and “Classic Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance,” but not as much as one would expect. “The Reader,” for example, offers excerpts from Hurston’s novel “Jonah’s Gourd Vine,” while “Classic Fiction” opts for two of her short stories.“Classic Fiction” also includes two novels in their entirety, Claude McKay’s “Home to Harlem” and Nella Larsen’s “Quicksand.” And as editor, Andrews provides an enlightening introduction and biographical essays on each author.Two forthcoming books promise to explore other aspects of die Harlem Renaissance. This coming fall, Indiana University Press will publish Hurston scholar Chetyl A. Wall’s “Women of Letters of the Harlem Renaissance.” This month, Pantheon begins a new series, “Circles of the Twentieth Century,” with Steven Watson’s illustrated history, “The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture.”lt;?;n inacc rViuiYia on/1 n lnccrvn /am lifn I I
Newspaper Details
Sun Journal
New Bern, North Carolina, US
Sun, Mar 19, 1995
Page 26
Full Page
Clipped by
Melissa S.
NA, 27 Feb 2025
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