Wallace Thurman's Harlem Renaissance

Book excerpt: Wallace Thurman (1902-1934) played a pivotal role in creating and defining the Harlem Renaissance. Thurman's complicated life as a black writer is described here for the first time: from his birth in Salt Lake City, Utah; through his quixotic and spotty education; to his arrival and residence in New York City at the height of the New Negro Movement in Harlem. Seen as it often is through the life of Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance is celebrated as a highly successful Afro-centrist achievement. Seen from Thurman's perspective, as set against the historical and cultural background of the Jazz Age, the accomplishments of the Harlem Renaissance appear more qualified and more equivocal. In Thurman's view the Harlem Renaissance's failure to live up to its initial promise resulted from an ideological underpinning which was overwhelmingly concerned with race. He felt that the movement's self-consciousness and faddism compromised the aesthetic standards of many of its writers and artists, including his own.