This chapter traces the evolution of the sketch or narrative fragment throughout the modernist era. Scholars of Black print culture have argued that the sketch is the predominant form of nineteenth-century Black writing. The unfinished quality of the sketch resonates with ongoing Black freedom struggles that persist from Reconstruction through the interwar period – temporal parameters that mark African American modernist writing. Through examination of authors from select flashpoints at the beginning, middle, and end of the era, this chapter illustrates how African American modernists transformed genres popularized during the late nineteenth century while gesturing toward the future. Turning to Jean Toomer’s Cane, one of the era’s most definitive Afro-modernist creations, I connect threads between the anti-lynching discourse featured in Frances E. W. Harper’s and Ida B. Well’s writings with Toomer’s genre-bending collection of poetry, prose, and dramatic sketches. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Gwendolyn Brooks’ novelette Maud Martha: a “late” modernist text.

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson explores the social and private spaces of the New Negro movement to delineate the subjective but recognizable element of taste. The chapter reads spaces such as the salon, the parlor, and the cabaret in order to define the aesthetic considerations of the period. The interior design of such locales offers a new way of understanding the period outside of the Black/white binary and simplistic assumptions about the black bourgeoisie. Readers can discern a great deal about New Negro style by focusing on "the spatially attentive narratives of the storied interiors of the Harlem Renaissance." Reading Edward Christopher Williams’s The Letters of Davy Carr, Jean Toomer’s play Natalie Mann, as well as descriptions of important salon spaces such as Villa Lewaro, Sherrard-Johnson analyzes how the objects and accoutrements within certain spaces reflect the aesthetic debates of the New Negro period.

Sherrard Johnson’s chapter identifies some of the various aesthetic models and modes with which African Americans experimented in telling individual life stories during the New Negro movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and the interwar years. Sherrard Johnson argues that in migration and travel narratives and other autobiographical writings of the New Negro era, African American authors travel literally and figuratively; the power of these self-stories resides in an author’s interior reflection fused with external observations that both harness and resist the collective self.

As early twentieth-century Anglo-American women writers such as Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Zona Gale used their writing to create new audiences and explore how the figure of the New Woman was changing American perceptions of gender roles, several African American women novelists worked to revamp the contested image of the New Woman into the New Negro woman. Their artistic activism linked the ideology of racial uplift with the recuperation of the image of African American woman from the dehumanizing and degrading stereotypes that went hand in hand with slavery and its aftermath. As black women writers struggled to fuse their political and aesthetic aims, they often felt frustrated by the claims of both. The proto-feminist journalist Mary Church Terrell, who is far better known for her political writings than her fiction, believed that “the Race Problem could be solved more swiftly and more surely through the instrumentality of the short story or novel than in any other way” (Terrell as quoted in McHenry, “Towards a History of Access,” 234).

Terrell's frustration with her inability to place her fiction in mainstream venues such as Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, or Scribner's Magazine may have prompted writers like Pauline Hopkins to persist in serializing her novels in African American periodicals, like the Colored American Magazine, a publication that ensured her an audience. Despite discouraging odds, several early twentieth-century African American woman writers pioneered major literary innovations.