Wallace Thurman
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Wallace Henry Thurman (1902-1934) was an African American novelist during the Harlem Renaissance. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, which describes discrimination based on skin color among black people.
Thurman's Life
Thurman was born in Salt Lake City in 1902. He attended the University of Utah and the University of Southern California but left without receiving a degree. In 1925 he moved to Harlem. The following year he became the editor of The Messenger, a socialist journal aimed at black audiences. He also published one issue of the literary magazine Fire!!. Among the writers he published were Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.
During this time, Thurman's Harlem rooming house apartment became the main place where the literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance met and socialized. Thurman and Hurston mockingly called the room "Niggerati Manor," in reference to all of the black literati who showed up there.
Thurman's Writings
Thurman wrote a play, Harlem, which debuted on Broadway in 1929 to mixed reviews. The same year his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life was published. The novel is now recognized as a groundbreaking work of fiction because of its focus on intraracial prejudice, specifically between light-skinned and dark-skinned black people. However, at the time many African Americans did not like the public airing of their community's so-called "dirty laundry."
Three years later Thurman published Infants of the Spring, a satire about the themes and the individuals of the Harlem Renaissance. He co-authored a final novel with A.L. Furman, The Interne, published in 1932.
Thurman died in 1934 from tuberculosis, which many suspect was brought on by his long fight with alcoholism. According to Langston Hughes, Thurman was "...a strangely brilliant black boy, who had read everything and whose critical mind could find something wrong with everything he read."
See also
External links
- [Thurman's bibliography and a copy of table of contents from literary magazine Fire!!]
- [Detailed biography of Thurman]
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