cover image Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance

Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance

Cary D. Wintz. Rice University Press, $32.5 (277pp) ISBN 978-0-89263-267-1

Although this important cultural history contains details about the lives, careers and achievements of Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes and many other black American writers of the 1920s and 1930s, it examines the Harlem Renaissance more as a social and intellectual movement, in a new urban setting, within the framework of earlier black social, literary and intellectual history, as well as its connections with Garveyism and other political alternatives. The study also shows how it related to black critics such as Alain Locke and Sterling Brown and to Carl Van Vechten and other members of the white literary establishment. According to Wintz, professor of history at Texas Southern University, the movement was primarily a state of mind or attitude rather than a common political, social or literary ideology or philosophya sense of community, ``a feeling that they were all part of the same endeavor.'' (Oct.)