African-American Writers
The Harlem Renaissance was a literary movement, above all. It was led by well educated African-Americans who expressed a new type of life, a new pride in the African-American culture.
Alain Locke published this collection of literary works by young African-Americans writers.
Created by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who popularized the term The Jazz Age.
Edith Wharton
- She was a designer, novelist and short story writer.
- With her novel The Age of Innocence she won a Pulitzer Prize.
- She was the first woman to win an award.
John Dos Passos
- He was a novelist and an artist.
- His novel Three Soldiers attacked war as a machine design to crush human freedom.
- Though he was an artist he never gained recognition as a great artist.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
- She wrote poems celebrating youth and the life of independence and freedom.
- She was also known for her activism and her many love affairs.
Ernest Hemingway
- He became the best-known expatriate author.
- In some of his novels, such as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms, he criticized the glorification of war.
- "The Lost Generation" was a term that he popularized. the term was used to refer to the generation that came of age during World War I.
Zora Neale Hurston
- She was best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
- She portrayed the lives of poor, uneducated Southern blacks.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Was an author of novels and short stories.
- He also coined the term of "Jazz Age" to describe the 1920s.
W. E. B. Du Bois
- He helped young talented African-Americans next to James Weldon Johnson.
- He was the First African-American to earn a doctorate at Harvard.
- He was an intellectual leader in the United States as a historian, civil rights activist, author and editor.
James Weldon Johnson
- He is remembered by his leadership within the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). This urge African-Americans to protest racial violence.
- He was also the first African-American professor at New York University.
- He edited The Book of American Negro Poetry, which was recognized as "a major contribution to the history of African-American literature" by the Academy of American Poets.
Marcus Garvey
- He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL).
- His movement lured followers with practical plans, especially his program to promote African-American business.
- He believed that African-Americans should build a separated society.
- Marcus Garvey was a journalist and publisher.
Claude Mckay
- Jamaican-American writer and poet.
- He published his most famous novel, Home To Harlem (1928), a best-seller that won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature.
Langston Houghes
- He was the movement's best-known poet.
- Some of his poems moved to the tempo of jazz and blues.
- In his poems he descried the difficult lives of the working-class of African-Americans.
Sinclair Lewis
- He was the first African-American to win a Nobel Prize in literature.
- Was among the era's most outspoken critics.
