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Harlem Renaissance: Five Novels of the 1920s

Cane, Jean Toomer | Home to Harlem, Claude McKay | Quicksand, Nella Larsen | Plum Bun, Jessie Redmon Fauset | The Blacker the Berry, Wallace Thurman

Edited by Rafia Zafar

“This brilliant anthology is a major contribution to our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance and to the history of the novel in America.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Overview
News & Views

Overview

Influences Jeffrey Colvin: The wide-ranging influences that helped inspire Africaville
December 10, 2019

Interviews Library of America interviews Rafia Zafar about the Harlem Renaissance
February 1, 2019

News Harlem Renaissance literature plays strong supporting role in MoMA’s Jacob Lawrence exhibition
January 29, 2019

Buy all both Harlem Renaissance volumes in a boxed set and save $10.

The novels of the Harlem Renaissance form a vibrant collective portrait of African American culture in a moment of tumultuous change and tremendous hope. “In some places the autumn of 1924 may have been an unremarkable season,” wrote Arna Bontemps. “In Harlem it was like a foretaste of paradise.”

Harlem Renaissance: Five Novels of the 1920s leads off with Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), a unique fusion of fiction, poetry, and drama rooted in Toomer’s experiences as a teacher in Georgia. Toomer’s masterpiece was followed within a few years by a cluster of novels exploring black experience and the dilemmas of black identity in a variety of modes and from different angles.

Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), whose freewheeling, impressionistic, bawdy kaleidoscope of Jazz Age nightlife made it a best seller, traces the picaresque adventures of Jake, a World War I veteran, within and beyond Harlem.

Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), is a poignant, nuanced psychological portrait of a woman caught between the two worlds of her mixed Scandinavian and African American heritage.

Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun (1928), is the richly detailed account of a young art student’s struggles to advance her career in a society full of obstacles both overt and insidiously concealed.

Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1929), is an anguished, provocative look at prejudice and exclusion as it tells of a new arrival in Harlem searching for love.

Each in its distinct way testifies to the enduring power of the Harlem ferment.

Often controversial in their own day for opening up new realms of subject matter (including intergenerational conflict and color prejudice within the African American community) and language (infusing a wealth of argot and previously unheard voices into American fiction), these novels continue to surprise by their passion, their unblinking observation, their lively play of ideas, and their irreverent humor.

Rafia Zafar, editor, is a professor of English with joint appointments in the African & African American Studies and American Culture Studies programs at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760–1870 (1997) and the book-length study “Fictions of the Harlem Renaissance,” which appears in the sixth volume of The Cambridge History of American Literature (2002). She has also edited New Essays on Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1996; with Deborah Garfield), and God Made Man, Man Made the Slave: The Autobiography of George Teamoh (1992; with F. N. Boney and R. L. Hume).

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Influences Jeffrey Colvin: The wide-ranging influences that helped inspire Africaville
December 10, 2019

Interviews Library of America interviews Rafia Zafar about the Harlem Renaissance
February 1, 2019

News Harlem Renaissance literature plays strong supporting role in MoMA’s Jacob Lawrence exhibition
January 29, 2019

News Rejecting Claude McKay: An author’s lost, and last, novel
September 22, 2017

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-099-5 877 pages

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N° 217 Library of America Series

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