In 1926 a white novelist, Carl Van Vechten, published the sensational bestseller Nigger Heaven and hundreds of white thrillseekers ventured uptown from Manhattan to witness and experience firsthand the exotic and lusty life that, according to the novel, characterized Harlem. A year earlier black scholar Alain Locke had edited the March issue of The Survey Graphic, which portrayed the "New Negro," a term Locke coined to denote a new breed of blacks both inside and outside the arts that had emerged following the First World War. Also in 1926 a group of young writers, poets, and artists banded together to publish Fire!!, an extremely intense journal of black literary expression. Although Fire!! failed after a single issue, it mirrored the passion and the unrest of the young black writers. Each of these events reflected a significant aspect of the literary movement known variously as the New Negro movement, the Negro Renaissance, and the Harlem Renaissance; taken together, they provide a succinct and remarkably accurate glimpse of the diverse and diffuse currents that surfaced in the mid-1920s and gave rise to a surge of black literary creativity.

The Harlem Renaissance was primarily a literary and intellectual movement, the precise chronological limits of which are somewhat difficult to define. Generally the consensus among scholars has been that the Harlem Renaissance was an event of the 1920s, bounded on one side by the war and the race riots of 1919 and on the other side by the 1929 stock market crash. Some, however, have greatly extended or sharply limited the movement's lifespan. Abraham Chapman, for example, saw elements of the Renaissance in Claude McKay's poetry of 1917 and even in W. E. B. Du Bois's poem " Song of Smoke," which appeared in 1899. Nathan Huggins dated the beginning of the Renaissance to the period between World War I and 1920, when the locus of black leadership shifted from Tuskegee to New York, and he saw the Harlem Riots of 1935 as the final factor in its demise. John Hope Franklin argued that the Renaissance continued into the 1960s after suffering only slight and generally negligible interruptions during the Depression and the Second World War. Benjamin Brawley, on the other hand, gave only lip service to the "socalled Negro literary renaissance," which he felt was centered around the publication of Nigger Heaven and which he asserted had no significant positive influence on black literature. Sterling Brown, one of the participants in the Renaissance, denied that Harlem was ever the center of the New Negro literary movement.

The Harlem Renaissance was basically a psychology - a state of mind or an attitude - shared by a number of black writers and intellectuals who centered their activities around Harlem in the late 1920s and early 1930s. These men and women shared little but a consciousness that they were participants in a new awakening of black culture in the United States. Those directly involved in the movement were all black, although Carl Van Vechten to a major degree and other white writers, patrons, and publishers to a lesser degree participated in and influenced the movement. There was no common bond of political or racial ideology, personal experience, background, or literary philosophy that united the various elements in the Renaissance. What they held in common was a sense of community, a feeling that they were all part of the same endeavor.

Given this interpretation, it is difficult to see the Renaissance beginning before the early twenties, when Jean Toomer published Cane and black writers and scholars began to realize that something new was happening in black literature. The movement extended well into the 1930s and included the later works of Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes. As long as they and other writers consciously identified with the Renaissance, the movement continued. It did not, however, encompass the younger writers like James Baldwin and Richard Wright who emerged in the late thirties and the forties. This group of writers never really identified with or felt themselves to be part of the Harlem Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance may best be conceptualized as a group of young writers orbiting somewhat erratically around several older black intellectuals who were established in the NAACP, in the Urban League, or with black journals and universities. These older men and women, while sometimes participating directly in the creative aspects of the Renaissance, served chiefly as critics, advisers, and liaisons between the younger black writers and the white literary establishment. This group, consisting of people such as James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and W.E.B. Du Bois, generally helped lesser-known black writers make contacts with white publishers and potential patrons. As such, they exerted considerable influence and a certain amount of control over aspiring black writers.

The focal point of the Renaissance was Harlem. Next to the feeling that they belonged to a common literary movement, Harlem was the experience that bound the otherwise diverse participants to one another. Although not every writer made Harlem his or her home, everyone associated with the Renaissance spent at least some time there, and, more important, all of them viewed Harlem as the hub of black literary activity. Even those who were critical of the Renaissance recognized the strong pull of the city on black writers. Benjamin Brawley, for example, blasted those who saw Harlem as the center of the Negro's literary ambition. James Weldon Johnson, on the other hand, encouraged black writers to come to Harlem. In 1928 he urged Claude McKay to cease his wanderings and return to New York, where he could benefit from the literary opportunities offered by the Renaissance, then at the height of its popularity, and at the same time provide strength to the movement. As Johnson later observed, during the 1920s Harlem had become the "black metropolis" in the heart of the white city, the acknowledged capital of black America. For the New Negro, Harlem was the Mecca of the black world...