Harlem Renaissance Novels (boxed set)

Nine great novels of the 1920s and 30s in one deluxe boxed set

In little more than a decade during the 1920s and 30s, a new generation of African American writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals based mostly in upper Manhattan burst through aesthetic conventions with unprecedented openness and daring. Perhaps no one was more central to the creative upheaval that became known as the Harlem Renaissance than a group of novelists who were determined to describe their own lives and their own world frankly and without compromise.

Now, for the first time in this definitive two-volume set, their greatest works are presented in a handsome collector’s edition featuring authoritative texts and a chronology, biographies, and notes reflecting the latest scholarship.

• Cane, Jean Toomer
• Home to Harlem, Claude McKay
• Quicksand, Nella Larsen
• Plum Bun, Jessie Redmon Fauset
• The Blacker the Berry, Wallace Thurman
• Not Without Laughter, Langston Hughes
• Black No More, George Schuyler
• The Conjure-Man Dies, Rudolph Fisher
• Black Thunder, Arna Bontemps

Together, the nine works in Harlem Renaissance Novels form a vibrant collective portrait of African American culture in a moment of tumultuous change and tremendous hope. “In some places the autumn of 1924 may have been an unremarkable season,” wrote Arna Bontemps, one of the novelists in the collection. “In Harlem it was like a foretaste of paradise.”

Rafia Zafar, editor, is a professor of English with joint appointments in the African & African American Studies and American Culture Studies programs at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760–1870 (1997) and the book-length study “Fictions of the Harlem Renaissance,” which appears in the sixth volume of The Cambridge History of American Literature (2002). She has also edited New Essays on Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1996; with Deborah Garfield), and God Made Man, Man Made the Slave: The Autobiography of George Teamoh (1992; with F. N. Boney and R. L. Hume).

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Also of interest:
The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks (American Poets Project)
Charles W. Chesnutt: Stories, Novels, and Essays,
W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings
Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories
Richard Wright: Early Works
Richard Wright: Later Works

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