Harlem's Glory

Book excerpt: In poems, stories, memoirs, and essays about color and culture, prejudice and love, and feminine trials, dozens of African-American women writers--some famous, many just discovered--give us a sense of a distinct inner voice and an engagement with their larger double culture. Harlem's Glory unfolds a rich tradition of writing by African-American women, hitherto mostly hidden, in the first half of the twentieth century. In historical context, with special emphasis on matters of race and gender, are the words of luminaries like Zora Neale Hurston and Georgia Douglas Johnson as well as rare, previously unpublished writings by figures like Angelina Weld Grimké, Elise Johnson McDougald, and Regina Andrews, all culled from archives and arcane magazines. Editors Lorraine Elena Roses and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph arrange their selections to reveal not just the little-suspected extent of black women's writing, but its prodigious existence beyond the cultural confines of New York City. Harlem's Glory also shows how literary creativity often coexisted with social activism in the works of African-American women. This volume is full of surprises about the power and diversity of the writers and genres. The depth, the wit, and the reach of the selections are astonishing. With its wealth of discoveries and rediscoveries, and its new slant on the familiar, all elegantly presented and deftly edited, the book will compel a reassessment of writing by African-American women and its place in twentieth-century American literary and historical culture.