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African American literature

The Harlem Renaissance > Novelists

McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay's novel Home to Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more lurid side of Harlem's nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes's The Big Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer's Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade. Like T.S. Eliot's modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher's The Walls of Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel's balanced satire of class and colour prejudice among black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman's The Blacker the Berry (1929) exposes colour prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality. The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the black female protagonists of her novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern black community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.

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