Harlem Renaissance - Softcover

Huggins, The Late Nathan Irvin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195063368 ISBN 13: 9780195063363

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2007

Synopsis

A finalist for the 1972 National Book Award, hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "brilliant" and "provocative," Nathan Huggins' Harlem Renaissance was a milestone in the study of African-American life and culture. Now this classic history is being reissued, with a new foreword by acclaimed biographer Arnold Rampersad.

As Rampersad notes, "Harlem Renaissance remains an indispensable guide to the facts and features, the puzzles and mysteries, of one of the most provocative episodes in African-American and American history." Indeed, Huggins offers a brilliant account of the creative explosion in Harlem during these pivotal years. Blending the fields of history, literature, music, psychology, and folklore, he illuminates the thought and writing of such key figures as Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and W.E.B. DuBois and provides sharp-eyed analyses of the poetry of Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. But the main objective for Huggins, throughout the book, is always to achieve a better understanding of America as a whole. As Huggins himself noted, he didn't want Harlem in the 1920s to be the focus of the book so much as a lens through which readers might see how this one moment in time sheds light on the American character and culture, not just in Harlem but across the nation. He strives throughout to link the work of poets and novelists not only to artists working in other genres and media but also to economic, historical, and cultural forces in the culture at large.

This superb reissue of Harlem Renaissance brings to a new generation of readers one of the great works in African-American history and indeed a landmark work in the field of American Studies.

About this title

About the Author

Nathan Irvin Huggins was W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of History and Afro-American Studies and Director of the Du Bois Institute at Harvard University until his death in 1989. His books include Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass, Black Odyssey: The African-American Ordeal in Slavery, and Voices From the Harlem Renaissance. Arnold Rampersad is Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University and is the author of The Life of Langston Hughes, among other titles.

Review

"A significant contribution to cultural history....Huggins amply demonstrates [that] black and white culture and self-image in America are inextricably linked as one."--Robert Sklar, Journal of American History

"Still the most richly textured introduction to the diversity of voices in the Harlem Renaissance."--Susan Stanford Friedman, University of Wisconsin at Madison

"One of the most important volumes of intellectual history ever written about the episode in African-American life in the twentieth century."--Lamont H. Yeakey, Black Forum

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0195063368
• ISBN 13: 9780195063363
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 343