Harlem Renaissance : four novels of the 1930s /
Four novels of the 1930s.
Rafia Zafar, editor.
- New York : Library of America, c2011.
- 848 p. ; 21 cm.
- The Library of America ; 218. .
- Library of America ; 218. .
Includes bibliographical references.
Not without laughter / Black no more / The conjure-man dies / Black thunder / Langston Hughes -- George S. Schuyler -- Rudolph Fisher -- Arna Bontemps.
Four Novels of the 1930s captures the diversity of genre and tone nourished by the Renaissance. Langston Hughes's Not Without Laqughter (1931)---the poet's only novel, an elegiac, elegantly realized coming-of-age tale suffused with childhood memories of Missouri and Kansas---follows a young man from his rural origins to the big city. George S. Schuyler's Black No More (1931), a satire founded on the science-fiction premise of a wonder drug permitting blacks to change their race, savagely caricatures public figures white and black alike in its raucous, carnivalesque send-up of American racial attitudes. Considered the first detective story by an African American writer, Rudolph Fisher's The Conjur-Man Dies (1932) is a mystery that comically mixes and reverses stereotypes, placing a Harvard-educated African "conjure-man" at the center of a phantasmagoric charade of deaths and disappearances. Black Thunder (1936), Arna Bontemps's stirring fictional recreation of Gabriel Prosser's 1800 slave revolt, which, though unsuccessful, shook Jefferson's Virginia to its core, marks a turn from aestheticism toward political militance in its exploration of African American history.
9781598531015 1598531018
2010942024
American fiction--African American authors. American fiction--New York (State)--New York. American fiction--20th century. African Americans--Fiction. Harlem Renaissance.