Infants of the Spring

This roman clef centers on Niggeratti Manor, fashioned after the Harlem rooming house in which Wallace Thurman once lived with other black artists and writers. Thurman's second novel is one of the most potent satires of the Harlem Renaissance and a retort to the idealized vision of Harlem's artistic community between World War I and the Depression.

This little-known classic of the Harlem Renaissance--by the mysterious, Utah-born bisexual Wallace Thurman, who died in obscurity in 1934--is both timeless and timely. It centers on the larger-than-life denizens of a Harlem mansion called "Niggeratti Manor": Stephen Jorgensen, the recently arrived Canadian; Paul, the ambivalent, uptown social critic; Pelham, the struggling poet; and Eustace Savoy, an entertainer disdainful of his Afro-American musical heritage. In this volatile gumbo of complex characters--which also pokes fun at a few famous writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes--Thurman weaves a hilarious story that critiques the paternalistic Negro author/white patron relationship, uncovers the social-class antagonisms in the Afro-American community, and foreshadows the sexual and social themes of James Baldwin and E. Lynn Harris. Thurman's elegant and elastic prose adds more illumination to this bright period in African American literature. --Eugene Holley Jr.