The New Negro Movement (later renamed the Harlem Renaissance) emerged toward the end of World War I in 1918, blossomed in the mid- to late 1920’s, and then faded in the mid- 1930’s. The Harlem Renaissance marked the first time that mainstream publishers and critics took African American literature seriously, and African American literature and arts grasped attention from the nation at large. The Harlem Renaissance emerged amid social and intellectual upheaval in the African American community in the early twentieth century. A number of factors laid the groundwork for the movement. A black middle

There are many key authors who made a name for themselves during this movement. These include, but are not limited to, Countee Cullen, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, Rudolph Fisher, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, Jean Toomer, Carl Van Vechten, and Walter White. W.E.B. Du Bois, in his book The Souls of Black Folk, rejected famed black educator Booker T. Washington's strategies of accommodation and compromise with whites in politics and education, because he perceived this kind of strategy as a denial of black citizenship rights. Countee Cullen was conservative writer: he did not ignore racial themes, but based his works on the models of 19th-century Romantic poets, especially Keats, and often used the traditional sonnet form. After the 1930’s, Cullen avoided racial themes all together (“Harlem” 1).

“Harlem Renaissance Authors” Encarta.com. 21 July 2002.

In the early 1920s several works signaled the new creative energy in African American literature. Claude McKay’s volume of poetry, Harlem Shadows (1922) became one of the first works by a black writer to be published by a national publisher. Cane (1923), by Jean Toomer, was an experimental novel that combined poetry and prose in documenting the life of American blacks in the rural South and urban North. There Is Confusion (1924), the f

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