Books in Brief: The Harlem Renaissance Remembered

The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, edited by Arna Bontemps (Dodd, Mead, 310 pp., $6.95). The Harlem Renaissance was an upsurge of Negro creativity in the 1920s which gave rise to such important black writers as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer and Wallace Thurman. Arna Bontemps was a minor poet in the movement and has edited this collection of essays on its artists. His introductory “memoir” gives, unfortunately, only a hazy impression of the men and ideas behind the Renaissance, but the other essays manage to fill the gaps. Mae Henderson’s portrait of the brilliant, eccentric Wallace Thurman is superb and Nicholas Canaday skilfully demonstrates Countee Cullen’s ability to universalize his sensitive verse by avoiding racial propaganda. But Larry Thompson’s examination of Jean Toomer is sophomoric and the piece on Langston Hughes tells much about the man’s life and little about his poetry. Bontemps’ selections provide a good, if limited, memoir of the Harlem Renaissance.