When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981)
They were years of tremendous optimism in Harlem—the decade and a half following World War I, when Langston Hughes, Eubie Blake, Marcus Garvey, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, and countless others began their careers; when Afro-America made its first appearance on Broadway; when its musicians found new audiences of the chic in search of the exotic in Harlem's whites-only nightclubs; when at one end of the social scale riotous rent parties kept economic realities at bay, while at the other A'Lelia Walker and white dilettante Carl Van Vechten outdid each other with glittering "integrated" soirées.
When Harlem Was in Vogue makes us feel the excitement of those times—and recaptures their intoxicating hope that black Americans could now create important art and compel the nation to recognize their equality. David Levering Lewis shows how black intellectuals embarked on a systematic program to bring artists to Harlem, conducting nation-wide searches for black talent and urging WASP and Jewish philanthropists (‘Negrotarians,’ in Zora Hurston’s phrase) to help support writers. He re-recreates the hot-house atmosphere in which ‘almost everybody above 125th street seemed to be writing for The Crisis, Opportunity or American Mercury, to be under contract to Boni & Liveright, Harper & Brothers, or Knopf.’ He introduces us to the flowers of that environment, some undeservedly forgotten, and shows how the program’s complex demands on writers—to reconcile art and propaganda, to attract white readers without reinforcing insulting stereotypes—ultimately sapped the energy of all but a few. We see Jessie Fauset’s novels about Harlem’s elite dismissed as boring by white critics, and the first book by a black writer to reach the best-seller lists, Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, repudiated by black reviewers. And yet we understand that at the time the contradictory purposes, the bitter quarrels and broad humor they inspired, all contributed to the movement’s vigor.
To give us this book—the first to cover all aspects of the Harlem Renaissance and assess its actual achievements—David Lewis immersed himself for years in the literature and journalism of the period; tracked down and interviewed dozens of survivors; ransacked libraries and attics for unpublished letters and fascinating photgraphs. When Harlem Was in Vogue reminds us just how important the Renaissance was, and is—this movement which sprang up in Harlem but lent its mood to he entire era, and whose after-effects even now add immeasurably to the richness and character of American life.