Other editions of book Infants of the Spring by Wallace Thurman

"[T]his delightful roman à clef about the Harlem Renaissance reflects . . . many of the competing notions of its time — between the masses and individuality, between art and uplift, between civilization and primitivism, between separatism and assimilation." — Kirkus ReviewsThis minor classic of the Harlem Renaissance centers on the larger-than-life inhabitants of "Niggerati Manor," an apartment building modeled on the rooming house where the author once lived among other celebrated black artists and writers. Enlivened by characters based on Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alain Locke, Wallace Thurman's rollicking novel satirizes the cultural confusion surrounding a golden age of African-American art and literature.Infants of the Spring was originally published in 1932 — shortly after the author's ground-breaking novel on interracial prejudice, The Blacker the Berry, and two years before his untimely death. Thurman's elegant prose and witty characterizations offer revealing insights into conflicts within the African-American artistic community as well as the struggle to maintain artistic integrity.

"[T]his delightful roman à clef about the Harlem Renaissance reflects . . . many of the competing notions of its time — between the masses and individuality, between art and uplift, between civilization and primitivism, between separatism and assimilation." — Kirkus ReviewsThis minor classic of the Harlem Renaissance centers on the larger-than-life inhabitants of "Niggerati Manor," an apartment building modeled on the rooming house where the author once lived among other celebrated black artists and writers. Enlivened by characters based on Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alain Locke, Wallace Thurman's rollicking novel satirizes the cultural confusion surrounding a golden age of African-American art and literature.Infants of the Spring was originally published in 1932 — shortly after the author's ground-breaking novel on interracial prejudice, The Blacker the Berry, and two years before his untimely death. Thurman's elegant prose and witty characterizations offer revealing insights into conflicts within the African-American artistic community as well as the struggle to maintain artistic integrity.

Modern Library Harlem Renaissance It's 1920s Harlem, and man, the joint is jumpin'. Folks are coming and going and everything's copacetic as long as the gin keeps flowing. This is the scene Stephen Jorgenson dives into when he arrives from Canada for the first time. He is taken to "The Niggerati Manor," an apartment building in Harlem inhabited by aspiring artists whose true talents lie in living, and where everything's black and white--with a lot of grayness in between. Counterbalancing Stephen's embrace of these folks is Raymond Taylor, a writer who is the only truly talented artist in the manor. Raymond's cynical take on the "new Negro artist" is the tightrope he walks between the love and hatred of himself and his people. Characters representing Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alain Locke all appear, and part of the fun of this book is figuring out who's who.

In this satire which shows the role of black writers and artists during the American Renaissance of the 1920s, Wallace Thurman proved himself to be a black writer who suffered no fools of any color, a modern satirist who, as re­publication here shows, was very much ahead of his time. Thurman was a novelist, ghost writer, editor of two Harlem magazines, and a playwright. His satire, derived from close personal observation, was directed primarily at the Harlem or Negro Re­naissance, which began in 1925. As John A. Williams points out in his Afterword to this new edition, Thurman and “nearly everyone with artistic as­pirations came to New York then, black and white; those were the merging days of the Harlem Renaissance, the Lost Generation, and the Jazz Age—really one extended explosion of American lit­erature, and there were influences passed between the groups.” The Renaissance flourished through 1929, then faded. Thurman’s satire came too late—1932, after its main target, the Harlem Renaissance, lay shrouded in the Great Depression woe that obscured or proclaimed frivolous all but proletarian art. Yet Infants of the Spring, stillborn then, lives today. By re-creating the bohemian lives of black artists of the 1920s, Thur­man corrects the assumption that one of America’s most creative decades owes its energy to whites alone.

Modern Library Harlem Renaissance It's 1920s Harlem, and man, the joint is jumpin'. Folks are coming and going and everything's copacetic as long as the gin keeps flowing. This is the scene Stephen Jorgenson dives into when he arrives from Canada for the first time. He is taken to "The Niggerati Manor," an apartment building in Harlem inhabited by aspiring artists whose true talents lie in living, and where everything's black and white--with a lot of grayness in between. Counterbalancing Stephen's embrace of these folks is Raymond Taylor, a writer who is the only truly talented artist in the manor. Raymond's cynical take on the "new Negro artist" is the tightrope he walks between the love and hatred of himself and his people. Characters representing Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alain Locke all appear, and part of the fun of this book is figuring out who's who.