When Alain Locke published "The New Negro," an anthology of black writers and poets centered in New York City's Harlem, a new era of literary and political awareness began: the celebration of blackness. Authors of the Harlem Renaissance broke with earlier... [more]

When Alain Locke published "The New Negro," an anthology of black writers and poets centered in New York City's Harlem, a new era of literary and political awareness began: the celebration of blackness. Authors of the Harlem Renaissance broke with earlier ethnic writers whose work mimicked white standards. Instead, they took the then-enormous liberty of rejecting the formulaic, Eurocentric notions of theme, content, and form in favor of writing in the style, idiom, vernacular, and cadences of their communities. The Renaissance group was on a mission -- to shuck off Uncle Tom. These writers searched for a unifying cultural identity and boldly proclaimed the advent of a new cultural aesthetic, a rebirth of ethnic pride on new soil. From such characteristic works as Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" to Langston Hughes' jazz-tinged, documentary-style poetry, the Harlem writers dared to capture the urban African American experience in all its truth, pain, humor, sense of exile, and vibrant beauty. Harlem Renaissance writers personified courage, dignity, and audacity through the simple, poetic expression of the tribulations of an oppressed people, by those people, and for those people. Their daring and innovative excavation of both ghetto sufferings and the creative riches of the African American communal journey profoundly inspired black revolutionary writers and thinkers of the 1950s and 1960s, including James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. [show less]