A period of remarkable creativity in literature, music, dance, painting, and sculpture by African-Americans, from the end of the First World War in 1917 through the 1920s.
As a result of the mass migrations to the urban North in order to escape the legal segregation of the American South, and also in order to take advantage of the jobs opened to African-Americans at the beginning of the War, the population of the region of Manhattan known as Harlem became almost exclusively Black, and the vital center of African-American culture in America.
Distinguished writers who were part of the movement included the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes (who also wrote novels and plays), Claude McKay, and Sterling Brown; the novelists Jean Toomer (whose remarkably inventive Cane,1923, included verse and drama as well as prose fiction), Jessie Fauset, and Wallace Thurman; and many essayists, memoirists, and writers in diverse modes such as James Weldon Johnson, Marcus Garvey, and Arna Bontemps.
The Great Depression of 1929 and the early 1930s brought the period of
buoyant Harlem culture—which had been fostered by prosperity in the pub-
lishing industry and the art world—effectively to an end. Zora Neale
Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and other works, however, are widely accounted as late products of the Harlem Renaissance.
Comments