The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance has become a well-known episode in American cultural history, as the time and place of the first great public flowering of black American art and literature. Yet, as Nathan Huggins suggests in his 1971 book of the same name, it is much more the idea of a Harlem Renaissance than its actual productions that has proved to be durable. Of the cultural figures associated with it, perhaps only poet Langston Hughes is still well-remembered, and his work still presented to a wide public. In contrast, Harlem Renaissance novels such as Claude McKay's Home to Harlem are more likely to be read today as cultural artifacts than as works of literature in their own right.

This state of affairs is all the more striking when we compare the literary and artistic productions of the Harlem Renaissance to another cultural development that centered in Harlem at about the same time: the rise of jazz as the predominant form of American music, and indeed arguably as America's outstanding cultural contribution to the world. This, moreover, was a movement that was scarcely noticed by the intellectual leaders of the Harlem Renaissance:

Harlem intellectuals promoted Negro art, but one thing is very curious, except for Langston Hughes, none of them took jazz--the new music--seriously. Of course, they all mentioned it as background, as descriptive of Harlem life. All said it was important to the definition of the New Negro. But none thought enough about it to try and

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