Of several descriptions of the culture of the twenties, two – F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Jazz Age” and Gertrude Stein’s “Lost Generation,” the one stressing involvement, the other detachment – have proved most durable, and both have paid a price for their durability: they have lost much of their power to spark recognition. In the letters, diaries, and journals of the era as well as the published memoirs – Margaret Anderson’s My Thirty Years’ War (1930), Edith Wharton’s A Backward Glance (1934), Joseph Freeman’s An American Testament (1936), Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Movers and Shakers (1936), Robert McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together (1938), Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company (1959), Janet Flanner’s An American in Paris (1940), Harold Loeb’s The Way It Was (1959), Matthew Josephson’s Life Among the Surrealists (1962), Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964), and Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return (1934) and A Second Flowering (1973), to name a few – anecdotes abound: of the lost “exiles” who shared Paris as a “moveable feast”; of Pound’s efforts to make things new; of Sherwood Anderson’s rejection of business for art; of Stein’s, Anderson’s, and Hemingway’s struggles to perfect their style; of Hemingway’s and Stein’s divisive competitiveness; of John Freeman’s, Dos Passos’s, and Genevieve Taggard’s lonely efforts to sustain the spirit of social reform by broadening the special disillusionment of the postwar years into a general disillusionment with the cultures of corporate capitalism; of the stunning effulgence, particularly in music and literature, in the flats, pubs, speakeasies, and cabarets of Harlem; of the rise that Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald shared and the crack-ups that divided them; of the suicides of writers as different as Dorothea and Gladys Cromwell, Harry Crosby, and Hart Crane; and of William Faulkner’s singular decision to return to the place of his birth, as a kind of resident exile who would always feel “at home” there, “yet at the same time … not at home.”

Writers whose art drew more from the customs and dialects of a region – as, for example, Jewett’s and Frost’s did from New England, Anderson’s and Lewis’s did from the Midwest, and Faulkner’s did from the South – had their own reasons for resisting New York. Even those who came to regard New York as a second home – as both Fitzgerald, born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Langston Hughes, born in Joplin, Missouri, did at times, and as Anzia Yezierska, born in Plinsk, Poland, did more completely – continued to draw sustenance from their memories of the provincial cultures that they carried with them. Writers from the South carried the additional burden of a history haunted by slavery, guilt, poverty, and defeat, and nothing that happened in the twenties lightened their load. To Mencken, who made infrequent use of understatement, the Midwest was a “forlorn country” of yokels and hypocrites. The “truths” that Carol Kennicott, protagonist of Main Street (1920), discovers were, Mencken reported, simply the truth: “the contentment” of the Midwest was “the enchantment of the quite dead.” The Midwest was “negation,” “prohibition,” and “slavery”: it was “dullness made God.” But Mencken spoke for the nation in making the South his favorite target of ridicule. The South epitomized the “idiocies of the Bible Belt,” he said, surpassing in hypocrisy and benightedness every civilization in history.

Henry Roth’s verbal explosion, and his hero’s near-execution at the trolley tracks, marked a violent escalation from such streetcar scenes as Stein’s enactment of sympathy or Antin’s memories of daring trolley-track games among immigrant children. As a setting of a vision, Roth’s choice of the Eighth Street trolley also resembled Toomer’s mystical experience at the 66th Street L station. By contrast, Richard Wright returned to the troubling historical legacy that the means of modern transportation were also prime places of racial segregation and tension, an experience that the Southern colored woman’s life story had recorded. In the racially bifurcated world that Wright confronted in his life and exposed in his writing, violent explosions were always a possibility. Wright made it his life-long task to attack segregation, calling attention to its social and psychological consequences, as he often focused on the transformation of fear into violence or rage.

In a section tellingly entitled “Squirrel Cage” that forms part of Wright’s first novel Lawd Today (completed in 1937), a conversation takes place among four young black men who have migrated from the South to the city of Chicago.

What do we know today about the literary phenomenon called by some the Harlem Renaissance, by others the New Negro movement? Was it a quixotic though noble failure? Was it the triumph of a black modernism paradoxically ignited by a Victorian brown bourgeoisie? Were its authors who plumbed the color line seeking to remake the very notion of race? How salient a category was gender to its creators? Was its literary nationalism part of larger global movements? A long scholarly debate surrounds the Harlem Renaissance – a debate about its meanings, parameters, and, indeed, its very existence. My title, “Fictions of the Harlem Renaissance,” is meant both to invoke the swirling stereotypes and shibboleths of the era, and to indicate the vitality of the literature in our time.

In the early twenty-first century, the scholarly consensus on the Harlem Renaissance runs as follows: the African American intellectual response to historical and social forces in the period immediately following World War I was a cultural construct, a belles-lettristic sleight of hand in which black intellectuals and writers elegantly tossed together a coherent movement that never actually took place. Said another way, the Harlem Renaissance did not really exist – if by a literary movement’s existence we mean to indicate an unselfconscious, spontaneous upwelling of artistic endeavor, one untainted by political ideology or commercial encouragement. This belief in aesthetic purity is a lovely sentiment, but few literary movements are innocent of social and economic factors. Almost universally, critics now acknowledge that the Harlem Renaissance was based on artifice and politically motivated social engineering.

By 1930, when he left New York for Paris, Henry Miller thought of himself as one of the last heirs of the Lyric Years’ commitment to the value of childlike innocence and unmediated feelings. Bored with literary works like Spenser’s Faerie Queene, he had exchanged studies at City College for a series of dreary jobs that included brief stints with a cement company and his father’s tailoring business and five years as supervisor of Western Union’s messenger service. But it was New York’s street life that engaged him, and its burlesque shows and dance halls, in one of which he met a hostess named June Smith, who became the subject of much of his writing. Later, gaining confidence, he denounced bookishness in favor of experience, spontaneity, and instinct. But his writings – from his early studies of outcasts, derelicts, and prostitutes to the series of novels that made him famous, Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), and Tropic of Capricorn (1939) – are in fact highly self-conscious performances. They are shaped as much by the books he had read – of Walter Pater and Henry James as well as Whitman, Dreiser, Norris, and London, whom he more or less owned up to – as by the things he had done and seen. And they demonstrate what his carefully constructed persona, introduced in New York, perfected in Paris, then transported to California, at once denied and suggested: that for him the doctrines of spontaneity and instinctivism and his celebrations of unmediated experience coexisted with an active, irrepressible aestheticism.

Harlem and the Renaissance exist as twin lieux de mémoire, places where individual and collective memories transform actual places and events into metahistorical, communal symbols. 1920s Harlem, held to be synonymous with the “New Negro” movement, figures as one such place. Black Harlem, with its shifts in social alignment, its geographic and transatlantic movements, its breaking-down and interrogation of boundaries between peoples and art forms, deserves pride of place for its imagined-yet-actual home for African Americans. If modernism denotes the yoking together of disparate forms and themes, and the creative efforts of those convinced that the world was not to return to its prewar “innocence,” then the authors of the Renaissance represent an integral part of that international movement. And if alienation – from one’s land, from one’s nation, from one’s place in the world – has been called a salient characteristic of the modernist frame of mind, who better could represent that anomic status than Americans of African descent? They too well personified the citizen without rights, the wanderer in new and strange lands.

For black American intellectuals then and now, the Harlem Renaissance contains symbolic cruxes. The New Negro movement demanded an end to the “subservient” Negro, and the beginning of the dismantling of repression. The Renaissance spoke to the inner self and longings of black Americans in a way that white mainstream writers could not and would not. When in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1922) Langston Hughes wrote “I have known rivers” in both the Congo and the Americas, he spoke to the idea of the African diaspora, long before the concept became a familiar term in the academy.

H. L. Mencken was always a provocative essayist, ready to surprise his readers with unpredictable attacks or new directions of cultural inquiry. Ethnic works from Louis Adamic’s Laughing in the Jungle (1931) to Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) and authors from Claude McKay to John Fante attested to the freeing influence of Mencken’s essays. Among the many topics he pursued, Mencken’s deepest interest was in language as it was actually spoken in the United States. He observed the linguistic enrichment that came with features of modernity such as the streetcar: “Trolley crews, in the days of their glory, had their jargon, too,” he wrote in 1948, “ e.g., boat for a trolley-car, horse for a motorman, poor-box for a fare-box, stick for a trolley-pole and Sunday for any day of light traffic.” Drawing on the “Lexicon of Trade Jargon,” a Federal Writers’ Project manuscript, he also noted that the trolley-car “gave us the expression to slip one’s trolley.”

Mencken was fascinated by the linguistic consequences of America’s multi-ethnic makeup, and undertook a still unparalleled effort to examine the many ethnic and non-English tributaries to the “American Language.” It is telling that Zora Neale Hurston’s “Story in Harlem Slang,” published in Mencken’s American Mercury, was accompanied by a glossary of the slang she employed, including “Big Apple” for New York, apparently still in need of annotation in 1942. Mencken was interested in all semantic and grammatical features that made American different from British English, and he called attention to many aspects of multilingualism that were present in America.

Zora Neale Hurston appeared to be the coeval of Anna Bontemps, another ambitious black college student who migrated to Harlem. As it turns out, the anthropologist-author, known for her fondness for trickster stories (and trickster behavior), was not born in the new century, as she led people to believe, but in 1891. She became well known for her shenanigans: Langston Hughes’s story of how she took a nickel from a blind man’s cup for the subway fare is Renaissance lore. Hurston trained in anthropology and folklore at Barnard College and Columbia University after initiating her studies at Morgan State. As she wrote in the very first sentence of Mules and Men (1933), “I was glad when somebody told me, ‘You may go and collect Negro folklore.’” To perform such work would validate her own origins as an African American. In addition, her training as a scholar enabled her to look more dispassionately on her upbringing, and see it more clearly than the one who never steps outside of her culture. Part of her love for her own people and place lay in her recognition of the richness of black American oral literature. Born and raised in the Deep South, Hurston lived a childhood that fellow Renaissance scribes Fauset, Larsen, Toomer, and Fisher could only imagine. Hurston declared herself a real Southerner, proudly proclaiming she had “the map of Florida on her tongue.”

Like poetry and art, fiction of the Lyric Years also got caught up in the play of hope and despair. In his early correspondence, describing his day-by-day struggles to get his fiction published in Eastern Coast magazines and by Eastern Coast publishers, Jack London complains, as Pound had, about the cost of postage as well as rejections. Later he began to flaunt his great success with macho swagger and then to analyze it with growing ambivalence, fearful that he had paid for it in the coin of corrupting compromise. In Martin Eden (1909), he confronts his writer-hero’s confused ambitions and locatesties between them and the ambitions of his nation: “In the moment of that thought,” he says of Martin Eden, “the desperateness of his situation dawned upon him. He saw, clear eyed, that he was in the Valley of the Shadow. All the life that was in him was fading, fainting, making toward death.”

Martin Eden is the story of a writer whose life bears striking resemblances to London’s own. One part of the significance of Martin Eden lies in the persistence with which it suggests that, despite its doctrine of impersonality, modern art often revolves around the interplay between artist and protagonist and between artist and work. Like London in his fiction, Gertrude Stein in hers, and Ernest Hemingway in his, Martin Eden treats everything that happens to him – poverty and wealth, obscurity and fame, neglect and celebrity, adventure and boredom, injury and good fortune, health and disease – as things that are somehow alien to him and yet are his own idea.

A short story by the Hungarian émigré Leo Szilard, entitled “Report on ‘Grand Central Terminal,’” written in 1948 and first published in the University of Chicago Magazine in 1952, engages the reader as an interpreter of the meaning of artifacts – against an unusual background. A research team of extraterrestrial scientists investigates Manhattan after a neutron-bomb war has destroyed all human, animal, and plant life on earth (hence all subjects of empathy), but has left buildings intact. The story develops a tension between the conservative narrator and the radical scientist Xram. Their conflicting views come to the fore as they investigate Grand Central Terminal, the New York train station that had been the subject of a 1915 Max Weber oil canvas and of several Berenice Abbott photographs, and that made Louis Adamic’s Slovenian birthplace seem so small. Szilard’s narrator explains: “What its name ‘Grand Central Terminal’ meant we do not know, but there is little doubt as to the general purpose which this building served. It was part of a primitive transportation system based on clumsy engines which ran on rails and dragged cars mounted on wheels behind them.” The narrator concludes that there must have been two kinds of people in the city of Grand Central Terminal, those with a “smoky” and those with a “nonsmoky” complexion; and he theorizes that in this primitive transportation system they were probably segregated as “smokers” and “nonsmokers.” A third strain of earth-dwellers, endowed with wings, appears to have died out earlier, since none of the numerous skeletons belonged to this winged strain and since their images “are much more frequently found among the older paintings than among the more recent paintings.”

There may be no better beginning for the story of ethnic modernism in American prose literature than the ending of Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha: Each One as She May.” This story, which forms the central part of Three Lives, an important book that was first published in 1909, ends:

Finis

Readers who are used to nineteenth-century aesthetic conventions – one only has to think of Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin or of Mimi in La Bohème – will be startled by the coldness of this “detached” death scene of Stein’s heroine. No effort is made to draw on the reader’s sympathy or to develop the narrative in a way that would sustain emotional engagement and identification.

Both the pioneering move into the lands of the West and the urbanizing move back into the cities of the upper Midwest and the East yielded stories in life as well as in fiction. To gauge the force of these contrasting lines of development, which were social, economic, and political as well as cultural, we need to keep three facts before us: first, that Henry Adams (1838–1918) and Henry James (1843–1916) were younger contemporaries of the great Sioux leader Sitting Bull (1834–90) and Buffalo Bill Cody (1846–1917), as well as older contemporaries of Isabel Archer, Ántonia Shimerda, Jim Burden, and Carrie Meeber; second, that the same Congress that devised Radical Reconstruction in order to secure the rights of black people of the South also enacted and funded a policy of radical subjugation and segregation of the original inhabitants of the West in order to conquer and dispossess them; and third, that the same group of Eastern industrial and banking interests that underwrote the cultural achievements of the Northeast became the chief beneficiaries of these policies as well as of the Homestead Act, which was rationalized as a reading and implementation of Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian dream.

In the summer of 1868, three years and a few months after the Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865, on which Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant met in Appomattox to sign the agreement that ended the Civil War, the federal government launched a relentless campaign against Native Americans and appointed General William T. Sherman, one of the deliverers of the black slaves of the South, to head it.

Novels emanating from the radical left shared some of the detective novel’s cynicism and most of Horace McCoy’s bitterness. Behind them lay a native tradition that reached back at least to I. K. Friedman’s By Bread Alone (1901) and The Radical (1907), Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), Charlotte Teller’s The Cage (1907), and Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908). But reform was what held the left together, and reform depended on hope. In 1937 – two years after Kenneth Burke urged the American Writers’ Congress to make “the people” rather than “the worker” their “basic symbol of exhortation and allegiance” – Nathan Asch published The Road: In Search of America. Both parts of Asch’s double adventure, of seeing “America” and then writing a book about it, unfold as a search for “the people,” representations of whom he finds in a young Mexican couple in Denver, Colorado, who live lives of resigned desperation; in a middle-aged man in Eureka, California, who hopes to become sick enough to qualify for charity before he and his wife starve to death; in Henry John Zorn, who has been left to rot away “underneath Montana”; and in a black family in Lost Prairie, Arkansas, who live “in a sievelike empty house amid a world of cotton.” Such people, Asch insists, are not “exceptional” cases but “usual and everyday and common.” Trapped in misery and dispossession, they resemble the residents of a flophouse that Sherwood Anderson describes in Puzzled America (1935), where people lie breathing “in and out together” in “one gigantic sigh.”

Langston Hughes, life-long friend and fan of Carl Van Vechten, captured the inner black world to which his well-off friend desired entry. Born in 1902 into rural poverty, the internationally renowned Hughes counted in his large œuvre short stories, novels, plays, operas, two memoirs, and children’s books, as well as edited and translated volumes. Hughes may be the one New Negro author who honestly could list his occupation as “writer.” He began his ascent to fame when Jessie Fauset published the nineteen-year-old poet’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in the June 1921 Crisis. Before the decade ended, Hughes brought out two much-reviewed collections of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). Rich in vernacular speech, humor, and musical influence, Hughes’s poems reveal his empathy with the average man and woman and his love for, and pride in, African American culture. Lines like “Night coming tenderly/Black like me” have fairly earned Hughes his reputation as the bard of black America. The swinging meter evident in much of his verse – “Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,/Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,/I heard a Negro play...” – trumpets his fusion of black literature and music, drawing on both the rhythms and the images of blues and jazz to create a singularly American poetry. Innovative in form in ways that much other work of the period could not approach, Hughes’s poetic amalgam of black music and vernacular earns him a high place in the pantheon of American poets.

Although the 1920s have been celebrated as the “free love” period, the Renaissance authors were the children of parents born during the Victorian era. Langston Hughes, an outspoken advocate of free expression, was born in 1902 and raised in good part by his grandmother. Claude McKay, like authors Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston, was born in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A significant project of black writers, artists, and activists was the normalization of black sexuality, if not its liberation. For the bulk of African Americans, the post-emancipation period meant a variety of freedoms, including personal ones. “Free love” literature appalled many blacks because African Americans still fought an array of negative stereotypes, chief among them the myths of the sexually rampant male and lascivious female. Yet sexual abandon and illegal stores of alcohol were precisely why many other people came to Harlem, whether white or black. Most of the black middle class eschewed any behavior deemed salacious, or even inappropriate. Working-class folk were less interested in the mainstream’s approbation, as they had less to lose than the bourgeoisie. The tension between these levels of black society were played out in fictional settings ranging from the bars of McKay’s novels to the stylish living rooms of Jessie Fauset. Gin joints and buffet flats (apartments where musical entertainment, illegal liquor and sexual partners could be obtained) were places where the less inhibited could enjoy themselves away from the disapproving gaze of their social betters. Sexuality within the black community remained contested for decades in black discourse.

What Antin argued in her autobiography and her lectures constituted in the eyes of some critics an erosion of the word “American.” As that word was increasingly claimed, or “usurped,” by “aliens,” alternative terms were launched such as “100 percent Americans,” “native Americans,” “only Americans,” “real Americans,” or “American-Americans.” Edward Bok asked in his second autobiography, Twice Thirty: Some Short and Simple Annals of the Road (1925): “How many of us, born here or elsewhere, could qualify as a ‘hundred per cent American’? Scarcely one, because, in truth, there is no such American.” Yet both Brander Matthews and Nicholas Roosevelt resorted to the term “American-Americans” when they critically reviewed Horace Kallen’s 1924 book of essays Culture and Democracy in the United States, the book in which Kallen introduced to print the term “cultural pluralism,” Matthews under the worried headline, “Making America a Racial Crazy-Quilt.” The negatively charged image of the quilt which also appeared in satirical cartoons of the cubists at the Armory Show had yet to be reimagined as a positive symbol of America’s happily diverse folk heritage.

Antin’s own story of Americanization served as a litmus test for the meaning of the word “American.” The New Englander Barrett Wendell, who was among the first professors of English to teach American literature at Harvard University, wrote in a letter of 1917 that Antin “has developed an irritating habit of describing herself and her people as Americans, in distinction from such folks as [Wendell’s wife] Edith and me, who have been here for three hundred years.”

Political commitment found expression in explorations of the national mood such as Louis Adamic’s My America (1938), Sherwood Anderson’s Puzzled America (1935), Nathan Asch’s The Road: In Search of America (1939), Theodore Dreiser’s Tragic America (1932), and Edmund Wilson’s American Jitters (1932). It found expression in explicitly proletarian writing that Granville Hicks and others collected in Proletarian Literature in the United States (1935). It found expression in numerous “radical” novels – many of them autobiographical and all of them more fervently felt than rigorously “proletarian” – including Nelson Algren’s Somebody in Boots (1935), Thomas Bell’s Out of This Furnace (1941), Robert Cantwell’s Land of Plenty (1934), Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited (1933), Edward Dahlberg’s Bottom Dogs (1930), Daniel Fuchs’s Summer in Williamsburg (1934), Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930), Albert Maltz’s The Underground Stream (1940), Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed (1934), and Clara Weatherman’s Marching! Marching! (1935). And it found expression in a vast “documentary literature”: films, recordings, and paintings as well as books about the lives, mores, and values of “the people” that culminated in a series of striking collaborations between writers and photographers, including James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941); Sherwood Anderson’s Home Town (1940), for which Edwin Rosskam selected Farm Security Administration photographs; Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937); Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor’s An American Exodus (1939); Archibald MacLeish’s Land of the Free (1938), which used FSA photographs; and Richard Wright’s Twelve Million Black Voices (1941), for which Edwin Rosskam again selected FSA photographs.

The greatest obstacle Harlem Renaissance writers faced was not the withdrawal of the public eye. The Great Depression, beginning in 1929 and continuing until the build-up to World War II, presented the worst barrier to their continued success. As the maid of Fisk sociologist E. Franklin Frazier snorted, she didn’t know why people were talking about a Depression; she’d known hard times all her life. The necessity of art was replaced with economic reality and aesthetic theory supplanted by politics. By the mid-1930s the tone and subjects of many writers had shifted from a celebration of Negro culture and the attractions of the black metropolis to the hard facts of breadlines, apartment evictions, and skyrocketing unemployment (at one point during the 1930s about 50 percent of Harlem residents able to work were unemployed). The Republican Party, once the party of choice for African Americans, gave way to the Democratic Party’s promises of a safety net for all. Despite his party’s gains with African Americans, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was no radical on race issues. Although he retained black educator Mary McLeod Bethune as an adviser, Roosevelt feared a liberal image would weaken his position with white Southerners, and endanger his larger slate of reforms; no antilynching bill would be supported by him. (Not until 1948, under the leadership of President Harry Truman, would the United States officially begin the process of desegregation.) Federal organizations set up to alleviate the disasters of the Depression ended up replicating the status quo. Blacks would continue to receive lower wages than whites, if indeed they received work and federal assistance at all.