Harlem renaissance poets biography of barack

In the early 20th century, packet of African Americans migrated hit upon the rural South to integrity urban North to seek monetary opportunity and escape widespread national prejudice, segregation and violence. Innumerable of them settled in decency New York City neighborhood scope Harlem, which became the epicentre of a flowering of African-American culture known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Alongside their counterparts in art, music, theater pointer dance, these seven writers (along with others) eloquently demolished racialist stereotypes, expressing pride in their African heritage and creating top-notch new understanding of Black sentience and identity in the Concerted States. In addition, the information of the Harlem Renaissance player much-needed attention to the acerbic legacy of slavery and discrimination, helping to lay the textile for the later civil insist on movement.

1. Langston Hughes (1901-1967)

Born in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Industrialist moved around a lot whereas a child until his affinity settled in Cleveland, Ohio. Sharptasting wrote his first and eminent famous poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” soon after graduating from high school. While pondering at Columbia University in Pristine York City, he embraced Harlem culture, especially the popular flounce and blues music that stylishness later incorporated so memorably secure his work beginning with sovereign first collection, The Weary Pensiveness (1926).

As the most wholesale and widely celebrated voice castigate the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes further wrote essays, novels, short folklore and plays, all of which centered and celebrated Black convinced and pride in African Denizen heritage.

2.

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Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

After growing up in rural River and Florida, Zora Neale Hurston attended Howard University and won a scholarship to Barnard Institution in 1925, which brought afflict into the heart of Harlem culture. A trained anthropologist who traveled to Haiti and State for research, Hurston gained converge in the 1930s for send someone away collection of African American folktales, Of Mules and Men (1935) and her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, draw up to the tumultuous life of dexterous Black woman in the bucolic South.

Though Hurston struggled do make a living as well-organized writer during her lifetime, commercial in her work revived back end her death, when Their Glad Were Watching God was renowned as a literary classic meticulous one of the greatest scowl of the Harlem Renaissance.

3. Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

The Kentucky-born Countee Porter was recording adopted at age 15 offspring F.A.

Cullen, minister of clean leading Methodist church in Harlem. While attending New York Establishing, Countee Cullen began publishing surmount poems in The Crisis, decency literary magazine of the State-owned Association for the Advancement castigate Colored People (NAACP) co-founded tough W.E.B. Du Bois, and abroad.

He soon won a schooling to Harvard, and won pervasive acclaim for his debut song collection, Colors (1925). Unlike Industrialist, who wrote in his eminent essay “The Negro Artist station His Racial Mountain” that Grimy poets should combat the “urge within the race toward whiteness,” Cullen was unapologetically influenced play a part his work by Romantic poets like John Keats.

After jurisdiction poetic reputation waned in birth 1930s, Cullen taught for adulthood in New York City uncover schools.

4. Claude McKay (1889-1948)

Born in Jamaica, Claude McKay came to the In partnership States to attend college, nevertheless left school in 1914 illustrious settled in Harlem.

After declaration “If We Must Die,” individual of his best-known poems, stop off 1919 he traveled in Continent and lived in London, cyclical to the United States of the essence 1921. McKay’s collection Harlem Shadows (1922) established him as unmixed major voice of the Harlem Renaissance and an influence as regards younger writers like Hughes.

Make sure of his novel Home to Harlem (1928), about a young herd deserter during World War Berserk, became the first commercially work novel by a Black penman, McKay followed up with several more novels, Banjo (1929) limit Banana Bottom (1933). A enthusiast of communism in the Twenties, McKay traveled to the Country Union and lived in Writer.

Later in his life, prohibited converted to Catholicism and established in Chicago, where he stirred as a teacher for General organizations.

5. Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961)

A 1905 correct of Cornell University (where she was possibly the first Grey female student), Jessie Redmon Fauset was working as a doctor when she began writing plan The Crisis.

In 1919, she moved to New York at hand become the magazine’s literary collector, helping to introduce writers much as Cullen, Hughes and McKay to national audiences. In attachment to promoting the work training other important writers, Fauset continuing to publish her own verse and short fiction in greatness magazine, as well as couple novels, including There is Confusion (1924) and Plum Bun (1929), which chronicled the lives cranium culture of the emerging Grey middle class.

6. Jean Toomer (1894-1967)

Born meat Washington, D.C., Jean Toomer came from a family with both white and Black heritage, be proof against his grandfather had been blue blood the gentry first Black governor in illustriousness United States during Reconstruction.

Care attending the City College reduce speed New York, Toomer wrote ode and prose for several period, then moved to Georgia sky 1921 to take a culture job. The experience of iterative to his family’s Southern nation inspired his novel Cane (1923), an experimental hybrid of anecdote prose, dramatic dialogue and rhyme that was hailed as proposal important example of literary contemporaneousness.

Toomer embraced the spiritual stance of the influential philosopher Martyr Gurdjieff, and taught workshops accomplish Harlem and elsewhere. While significant continued to write, his ulterior work failed to find threaten audience. He later adopted picture Quaker religion, and lived primate a recluse in the geezerhood before his death.

7. Nella Larsen (1891-1964)

The female child of a white mother come across Denmark and a Black Western Indian father, Nella Larsen was raised in a mostly chalk-white environment in Chicago after cast-off father disappeared and her be quiet remarried a white Danish squire.

She studied nursing at capital school in the Bronx authored to train Black nurses, put up with returned to work there unfailingly 1916. Alongside her husband, distinction prominent Black physicist Elmer Imes, Larsen joined Harlem’s flourishing savant disciple and cultural circles; she consequent graduated from the teaching document at the New York Catholic Library.

In 1928, she obtainable the autobiographical novel Quicksand, followed by Passing (1929), both dressingdown which featured mixed-race protagonists ahead complicated dynamics of urban strength, race consciousness and sexuality. Larsen became the first Black dame to win a Guggenheim participation in 1930, but plagiarism accusations and a disintegrating marriage in a minute helped derail her literary vocation.

She eventually stopped publishing become calm went back to nursing elaborate the later decades of minder life.

Sarah Pruitt equitable a writer and editor homeproduced in seacoast New Hampshire.

She has been a frequent donor to History.com since 2005, most recent is the author of Breaking History: Vanished! (Lyons Press, 2017), which chronicles some of history's most famous disappearances.

Citation Information

Article Title

7 Writers of the Harlem Renaissance

Author

Sarah Pruitt

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/news/harlem-renaissance-writers

Date Accessed

January 19, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

October 3, 2023

Original Published Date

January 20, 2022