Harlem's Glory Harlem's Glory: Black Women Writing, 1900-1950 Black Women Writing, 1900-1950

This book is a treasure. It is an incredibly rich amalgam of prose, poetry, non-fiction and fiction that readers will adore, with unifying commentary, footnotes and illustrated biographies that scholars will respect. It includes rare things, unpublished manuscripts, the words of self-educated women and the collective memory of their men and children. The authors (who also collaborated on Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers, 1900-1945) opted not to evaluate the pieces for ""quality,"" but instead chose those that struck them as ""vivid and memorable,"" and as contributing to the project overall. The result is a collection of great diversity that still speaks fully to the African American experience of racial hypocrisy and unity, of solidarity between black women and white, of the intellectual lives of those who've had a book in hand but no bread on the table. Every reader will have several favorites. Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West are here, but so are Nat Turner's granddaughter and a woman who worked her way around the world as a domestic. Roses, director of Latin American studies at Wellesley, and Randolph, an independent scholar, have also provided a context in which the work of all black writers of the period, but especially women, can be viewed as part of a rich tradition rather than a short-lived fluke of history in a crowded corner of one northern city. (Oct.)