Revisiting the Harlem Renaissance

I’m a Brooklyn girl, but I’m low-key obsessed with the Harlem Renaissance. I’ve written a book about the era and taught its literature at universities. I can, and often do, spend whole weekends rereading Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, listening to Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, thumbing through books featuring artwork by Aaron Douglas and Augusta Savage.

But what brings me back to the Renaissance again and again is the way it changed this country. When the movement started a century ago, the United States was finally creating our own distinctly original culture — songs and dances, paintings and novels. We were looking less to Europe as a model of creativity. And in this moment — the 1920s, in New York City, both uptown and downtown — we become more wholly American.

This year, a team of Times journalists marked the 100th anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance with a series examining its vibrant history.

We began with a little-known dinner party that took place on March 21, 1924, an unprecedented interracial gathering that included such luminaries as W.E.B. Du Bois, Carl Van Doren and Alain Locke, as well as up-and-coming writers like Gwendolyn Bennett and Countee Cullen.

Even today, in New York, this kind of gathering is rare. The purpose of the dinner was to marry talent to opportunity, connecting writers with editors and critics, and it was a wild success: In the decade after the dinner, Renaissance writers published more than 40 volumes of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, works that transformed the literary landscape of our nation. You can read about the dinner party (and the friendships, feuds and affairs that it launched) in this piece.