1. The Harlem Renaissance
The Poets and the Poems

2. Dates
The Harlem Renaissance is given roughly the dates from anytime after the turn of the century up to the early 1930s. Most scholars point to the flourishing of the Harlem community in the 1920s-with affluent, literate, professional African Americans settling in Harlem, NY following WWI. The African American population had been shifting to the north following the Civil War and the southern Reconstruction. Harlem, for whatever reason, became the mecca of many of the African American culture’s leading figures. Many of the movement’s greatest authors spent at least some time there—certainly the influence is much more widespread.

3. Paul Laurence Dunbar
Dunbar actually predates the real flourishing period of the Harlem Renaissance, and he never lived in New York. He born to former slaves in Dayton, OH and he attended an integrated high school although through most of his education he was the only black student. Although he sometimes found racial troubles outside of the school, within its walls he began his great writing career in a relative carefree atmosphere. He died at 33 from health problems complicated by alcoholism, but produced at least 16 published collections of poems and short stories. Most scholars agree that Dunbar is considered A father of the Harlem Renaissance and one of the most influential authors of his time. The three poems in 101 Great American Poems contain themes and motifs that are the inspiration for countless authors, poems and stories—the mockingbird’s song, the caged bird sings, the mask.

4. Claude McKay
McKay was born in Jamaica, but spent most of his adult professional life in America and the last nearly two decades of his life in Harlem. He published his first collection of poems then moved to the United State where he studied briefly at the Tuskegee Institute. He traveled the world, continued to write and publish, and explored world religions, economies, and politics before returning the US in the 1930s. Even during the Depression he continued to write and publish a variety of literature including an autobiography and an economic treatise, solidifying his place as one of prolific pantheons of the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1940s his health was on a steady decline. He was especially frustrated toward the end of his life because he never gained the financial status nor the stability he thought he was due.

5. Countee Cullen
Cullen was most likely born in 1903 but records of his birth are obscure—he may have been born in Louisville, Baltimore or New York. His later life is also both interesting and somewhat controversial. He rose to fame as a well-rounded author, with poems, short stories, children’s stories, a novel, newspaper articles, critiques, plays and musicals, and even a translation as his list of credits. He was also highly regarded as an author and received several literary awards. As with many authors of this era, the 1910s and 1920s were prolific times, but in the 1930s, Cullen suffered through difficult times personally and financially and his writing tapered off dramatically. In the 1940s he became a junior high school English teacher. While working on a Broadway musical, he mysteriously dies of kidney poisoning in 1946, before the production is completed.

6. Langston Hughes
Certainly the most prolific, most mentioned, and probably the popular of the authors of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes is also probably the face of the era. Born in Joplin, MO in 1902, Hughes was well educated, cared for, and encouraged throughout most of his young life and early career. He attended Ivy League Columbia University where his writing career began. Hughes remained a prolific and successful writer following the 1930s (one of the few).

7. Topics and an end to an era
Much of the subject matter dealt with the struggle of the African American community, not just in New York but country-wide. The themes of the continued struggle of the minority communities, freedom-both new found and desire for more-frustration and disillusionment (both modernist ideas), the tensions of a “newly” culturally diverse community were all prevalent. The influence of the Harlem Renaissance waned as the Great Depression took hold of the nation in the 1930s.