Product Description: Stretching from the close of World War I to immediately after the Depression, the Harlem Renaissance was a time of glorious artistic freedom and intellectual collaboration between black artists and white bohemians of Greenwich village. In his masterful and fascinating study of this era, Lewis takes a daring look at what was considered to be a successful utopian effort at assimilating and validating black culture in white America.
When Harlem was in vogue This is another great reference book with historical as well as antidotal information about Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s. I liked the detailed information Lewis gives about salaries, and the cost of living--groceries, rent and clothing back then.
What I appreciated in a major way, was the global view Lewis provided--putting into prospective what going on in white America and comparing it to activities in Harlem, DC and the Deep South from the beginning of World War I until the Great Depression.
Lewis also introduces some of the major players in Harlem's literary world--Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Claude Mc Kay, Carl Van Vechten, Richard Bruce Nugent, Sterling Brown, Nella Larsen, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Marcus Garvey, Alaine Locke, Wallace Thurman and A'Lelia Walker Robinson to mention a few.
This is an impressive piece of historical research work that should be required reading in all American schools.
When Harlem was in Vogue I have not had the opportunity to read this selection. I am interested in the Harlem Renaissance and will read this at first chance.
The Harlem Renaissance Comes Alive David Levering Lewis's book is a very readable review of the Harlem Renaissance. My interest in Zora Neale Hurston brought me to this book. Hurston began her literary career in the 1920s and is a key participant in the "New Negro Movement" or Harlem Renaissance, so I was interested both in the book's treatment of the movement itself and in its treatment of Hurston in particular.
While I would like to have seen a more thorough discussion of Hurston and a more sympathetic treatment of her work, I was taken by Mr. Lewis's scholarship and his wonderful style of writing. His descriptions of Harlem are enlightening, and he strikes a wonderful balance between providing detail and making a point. Even his biographical pieces giving background on the key Renaissance figures are filled with lively writing.
Having read this book, I am now a fan of David Levering Lewis. If you haven't read it, get it. You won't be disappointed. The book provides the historic context necessary to understanding this important period.
A Great Survey Of One Of America's More Notable Creative Waves... I've read David Levering Lewis' WHEN HARLEM WAS IN VOGUE several times, and am always fascinated by it. As previous reviewers note, the writing is exacting and very detailed, but I found that this methodical approach very vividly recreates the world of the Harlem Renaissance: this is one those rare books which manages to succeed in both it's academic rigor, and it's vivid, cinematic detail. It sent me back into many of the writers, some still well-known, many unfortunately not.
The book doesn't try to answer all the questions it raises, and it shouldn't - the subject is far too historically rich for one book. Still, the suggestions of class divisions within African-American communities are danced around here, and Lewis could have ventured a bit more deeply into that.
His cutoff with the Great Depression likewise seems a bit neat: Harlem's notorious decline is a vast and tragic subject unto itself, but Lewis does devote a little time to some of the roots of that decline - which were evident even in the waning days of the renaissance.
Still, there are many provocative accomplishemnts here - you will find the genesis of many strands of African-American art and political thought in the movement, and they are explored in detail here, and this great, vast introductory work is an excellent jumping-off point for further reading.
-David Alston
The Crowded Party The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s opened a fascinating chapter in American life, heralding the first time African-Americans were taken seriously as poets, novelists, painters, composers, and intellectuals by a broad white audience. David Levering Lewis is maybe too close to the figures he talks about to do them justice. Reading his book is like being at a crowded cocktail party with a friend who seems to know everyone and only has time for brief introductions before moving on to the next guest. You get just a glimpse of Renaissance luminaries like Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Wallace Thurman, and the imperious W.E.B. Du Bois before they disappear back into the swim of names.
On the upside, Lewis does a fine job of shedding light on the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of the African-American elites--the 'Talented Tenth'--who hoped to use the new vogue for all things black as a way of dissolving race prejudice. Insofar as the book has an argument, it's that Harlem grandees like Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Charles S. Johnson, and W.E.B Du Bois who saw intellectual achievement as an antidote to racism learned a hard lesson with the onset of the Depression, where economic reality squashed their assimilationist dreams and a new generation of black intellectuals opted for Communism over poetry.
The book left me wanting to know more about the white supporters of the New Negro Movement--patrons like Carl Van Vechten, the Spingarns, Julius Roswenwald, and the redoubtable Charlotte Osgood Mason, "Godmother" to Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston--who held the purse strings and much of the power in deciding which expressions of Harlem life made it to the mainstream. The louche world of jazz, nightclubs, liquor, rent parties, razor fights and skin-baring dancers that largely defined Harlem in the white imagination also goes pretty much unexplored in favor of Top Tenth aspirations to join the upper middle class. There's a disappointing reticence too about homosexuality among the era's leading lights. Still, it's a great book for piquing interest in some of the tensions and achievements that went into making Harlem the heart of the Roaring Twenties
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