Harlem Renaissance, term used to describe a flowering of African-American literature and art in the 1920s, mainly in the Harlem Harlem, residential and business section of upper Manhattan, New York City, bounded roughly by 110th St., the East River and Harlem River, 168th St., Amsterdam Ave., and Morningside Park.
..... Click the link for more information. district of New York City. During the mass migration of African Americans from the rural agricultural South to the urban industrial North (1914–18), many who came to New York settled in Harlem, as did a good number of black New Yorkers moved from other areas of the city. Meanwhile, Southern black musicians brought jazz jazz, the most significant form of musical expression of African-American culture and arguably the most outstanding contribution the United States has made to the art of music.

Origins of Jazz

Jazz developed in the latter part of the 19th cent.
..... Click the link for more information. with them to the North and to Harlem. The area soon became a sophisticated literary and artistic center. A number of periodicals were influential in creating this milieu, particularly the magazines Crisis, which was published by W. E. B. Du Bois Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt Du Bois) (dəbois`), 1868–1963, American civil-rights leader and author, b.
..... Click the link for more information. and urged racial pride among African Americans, and Opportunity, published by the National Urban League. Also influential was the book The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), edited by Alain Locke.

Responding to the heady intellectual atmosphere of the time and place, writers and artists, many of whom lived in Harlem, began to produce a wide variety of fine and highly original works dealing with African-American life. These works attracted many black readers. New to the wider culture, they also attracted commercial publishers and a large white readership. Writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance include Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes Hughes, Langston (James Langston Hughes), 1902–67, American poet and central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, b. Joplin, Mo., grad. Lincoln Univ., 1929.
..... Click the link for more information. , Claude McKay McKay, Claude (məkā`), 1890–1948, American poet and novelist, b. Jamaica, studied at Tuskegee and the Univ. of Kansas.
..... Click the link for more information. , Countee Cullen Cullen, Countee (koun`tē`), 1903–46, American poet, b. New York City, grad. New York Univ. 1925, M.A. Harvard, 1926.
..... Click the link for more information. , James Weldon Johnson Johnson, James Weldon, 1871–1938, American author, b. Jacksonville, Fla., educated at Atlanta Univ. (B.A., 1894) and at Columbia. Johnson was the first African American to be admitted to the Florida bar and later was American consul (1906–12), first in
..... Click the link for more information. , Zora Neale Hurston Hurston, Zora Neale, 1891?–60, African-American writer, b. Notasulga, Ala. She grew up in the pleasant all-black town of Eatonville, Fla. and, moving north, graduated from Barnard College, where she studied with Franz Boas .
..... Click the link for more information. , and Jean Toomer Toomer, Jean, 1894–1967, American writer, b. Washington, D.C., as Nathan Eugene Toomer. A major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, he is known for one work, Cane
..... Click the link for more information. . Visual artists connected with the movement are less generally known. Among the painters are Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden, Malvin G. Johnson, and William H. Johnson; the best-known sculptor is Augusta Savage. Photographers include James Van Der Zee Van Der Zee, James, 1886–1983, American photographer, b. Lenox, Mass. The son of Ulysses S. Grant's maid and butler, Van Der Zee opened his first studio in Harlem, New York City, in 1915.
..... Click the link for more information. and Roy De Carava. The Harlem Renaissance faded with the onset of the Great Depression Great Depression, in U.S. history, the severe economic crisis supposedly precipitated by the U.S. stock-market crash of 1929. Although it shared the basic characteristics of other such crises (see depression ), the Great Depression was unprecedented in its length and
..... Click the link for more information. of the 1930s.

Bibliography

See N. I. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (1971); B. Kellner, ed., The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary for the Era (1987); L. Harris, ed., The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond (1989); and H. Bloom, ed., Black American Prose Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (1994). In addition, many materials relating to the period can be found in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, N.Y.C.

Harlem Renaissance

A blossoming (c. 1918–37) of African American culture, particularly in the creative arts, centred in Harlem in New York City. As a literary movement, it laid the groundwork for all later African American literature and had a significant impact on black literature and consciousness worldwide. Its leading literary figures included James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps, Rudolph Fisher, Alain Locke (1886–1954), and Wallace Thurman (1902–34). Their work both fed and took inspiration from the creative and commercial growth of jazz and a concurrent burgeoning of work by black visual artists such as Aaron Douglas. Central to the movement were efforts to explore all aspects of the African American experience and to reconceptualize “the Negro” independent of white stereotypes.