Customer Reviews

When Harlem Was in Vogue

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Beyond the speakeasys, definitive cabarets and birth of contemporary black America based in Harlem, Mr. Lewis has given us a poignant and hard-hitting study that pitifully few whites and most contemporary blacks know about. My God! The story of the 369th Infantry Regiment marching up 5th Avenue raised the hair on my arms. The poets, playwrights, noveslists of the period are still a volatile inspiration today.The roots, "why's" and "who's" of Marxism, Garveyism and "how" they made sense as movements became clear for the first time. This piece of work is a must read for anyone who considers themselves knowledgable about culture of any race in this country. We carry a shameful legacy of mistreatment of ourselves and our brothers, and the thrust of the first Harlem Rennaisance (1920-35) was that art,(literature and the arts) could influence politics and the government in this country to make them more humane and less extreme, whether left or right. The Rennaisance didn't work as effectively as anyone had hoped, but the results of the cultural struggle, as real as the physical struggles, are coming to fruition over the last 60 years. Now maybe the fruit is ripe enough to share between us all. Lewis offers a banquet of information, stories, names, dates and situations that made me wish I could have been a part of the magnificent movements he has so elegantly documented. There was a world before TV and the internet - a world where people had dialogues, exchanged impassioned thoughts and attitudes as a lifestyle, and shared bared Souls in the hope of expanding their minds and freeing a race from the most insulting racial intolerances. To read this book is to be a part of the struggle and to have the opportunity to commit to the ever expanding culture lost to so many generations. Somehow I guess the poetry of Claude McKay could be the root of Hip Hop. Would he approve, and would the current generation appreciate the perspective? Time will tell

Claude McKay and Jean Toomer helped to launch the Harlem Renaissance and chose to live elsewhere. Sterling Brown denied that a Harlem Renaissance had ever existed. It began as a somewhat forced phenomenon.

DuBois believed the history of the world was the history of groups. War experiences spurred people to seek decisive change. Unfortunately a number of racial incidents took place directly after Word War I. The historian Carter Woodson was witness to a riot in Washington D.C.

Black Harlem ran from 130th to 145th Streets. Jazz and blues in Harlem were produced by persons from the Great Migration--Mamie Smith, Perry Bradford, and others. There were new stars in Harlem. Claude McKay and James Weldon Johnson became personal friends. MacKay's HARLEM SHADOWS appeared in 1922. Countee Cullen said that on the whole he liked CANE by Jean Toomer. Countee Cullen's only serious rival in Harlem was Langston Hughes.

Alain Locke and Charles Johnson, a sociologist, made contributions to the intellectual life of the Harlem leadership. Arna Bontemps and Zora Neale Thurston were also notable figures. Many motives animated the Lost Generation Caucasian supporters. The motives included guilt, Christianity, inherited abolitionism.

There were rent parties in Harlem and other evidence of stress and overcrowding. Nonetheless the twenties was a time of artistic triumph with such musical personalities James P. Johnson, Willie the Lion Smith, Fats Waller, and Duke Ellington seeking and finding engagements. There were success stories. Even in the Depression people were generally well-dressed and happy. Harlem was filled with strivers and professionals.

1925 was year one of the Harlem Renaissance. James Weldon Johnson's ancestors had been free, literate, and prosperous before the Civil War. He and his brother composed an opera. The mid twenties solidified the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem was Afro-America's Paris. LULU BELLE (1926) sent whites to Harlem in unprecedented numbers. Factually speaking, though, most of Harlem was sober and hardworking.

The Rosenwald Fund and the Harmon Fund were influential by promoting and rewarding African American artistic achievement. Alain Locke had been a sort of custodian of the Harlem Renaissance. Claude McKay's last novel appeared in 1933. Sugar Hill, Strivers' Row and the Dunbar were landmarks of the Renaissance. The last novel of the Renaissance was Zora Neale Thurston's JONAH'S GOURD VINE.

The book covers other topics interestingly, revealing many bits of information previously unknown to this reader. Photographs are included and an appendix of sources.

Harlem's gaudiest and best-known nightspot was a "whites only" nightclub serving Vaudevillian-style black entertainment to the white patrons that flooded into Harlem from downtown Manhattan. Everybody was swinging and boozing. They were high times and they were really hopping. Alcohol sales and consumption climbed rapidly. Nightclubs, cabarets and after-hours clubs, on the strip of 133rd Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues, thrived with the influx of white trade. Jazz, big bands, blues, and high-steppin', "high-yeller" girls set the tone. Money flowed in like water and the Mob's power grew. In the midst of all that was occurring, black artists, intellectuals and social activists flourished throughout Harlem in what is now called The Harlem Renaissance. Very well researched vital to learning about the richness of American life and character

The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s opened a fascinating chapter in American life, heralding the first time African-Americans were taken seriously as poets, novelists, painters, composers, and intellectuals by a broad white audience. David Levering Lewis is maybe too close to the figures he talks about to do them justice. Reading his book is like being at a crowded cocktail party with a friend who seems to know everyone and only has time for brief introductions before moving on to the next guest. You get just a glimpse of Renaissance luminaries like Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Wallace Thurman, and the imperious W.E.B. Du Bois before they disappear back into the swim of names.

On the upside, Lewis does a fine job of shedding light on the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of the African-American elites--the 'Talented Tenth'--who hoped to use the new vogue for all things black as a way of dissolving race prejudice. Insofar as the book has an argument, it's that Harlem grandees like Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Charles S. Johnson, and W.E.B Du Bois who saw intellectual achievement as an antidote to racism learned a hard lesson with the onset of the Depression, where economic reality squashed their assimilationist dreams and a new generation of black intellectuals opted for Communism over poetry.

The book left me wanting to know more about the white supporters of the New Negro Movement--patrons like Carl Van Vechten, the Spingarns, Julius Roswenwald, and the redoubtable Charlotte Osgood Mason, "Godmother" to Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston--who held the purse strings and much of the power in deciding which expressions of Harlem life made it to the mainstream. The louche world of jazz, nightclubs, liquor, rent parties, razor fights and skin-baring dancers that largely defined Harlem in the white imagination also goes pretty much unexplored in favor of Top Tenth aspirations to join the upper middle class. There's a disappointing reticence too about homosexuality among the era's leading lights. Still, it's a great book for piquing interest in some of the tensions and achievements that went into making Harlem the heart of the Roaring Twenties

This is another great reference book with historical as well as antidotal information about Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s. I liked the detailed information Lewis gives about salaries, and the cost of living--groceries, rent and clothing back then.

What I appreciated in a major way, was the global view Lewis provided--putting into prospective what going on in white America and comparing it to activities in Harlem, DC and the Deep South from the beginning of World War I until the Great Depression.

Lewis also introduces some of the major players in Harlem's literary world--Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Claude Mc Kay, Carl Van Vechten, Richard Bruce Nugent, Sterling Brown, Nella Larsen, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Marcus Garvey, Alaine Locke, Wallace Thurman and A'Lelia Walker Robinson to mention a few.

This is an impressive piece of historical research work that should be required reading in all American schools.

David Levering Lewis's book is a very readable review of the Harlem Renaissance. My interest in Zora Neale Hurston brought me to this book. Hurston began her literary career in the 1920s and is a key participant in the "New Negro Movement" or Harlem Renaissance, so I was interested both in the book's treatment of the movement itself and in its treatment of Hurston in particular.

While I would like to have seen a more thorough discussion of Hurston and a more sympathetic treatment of her work, I was taken by Mr. Lewis's scholarship and his wonderful style of writing. His descriptions of Harlem are enlightening, and he strikes a wonderful balance between providing detail and making a point. Even his biographical pieces giving background on the key Renaissance figures are filled with lively writing.

Having read this book, I am now a fan of David Levering Lewis. If you haven't read it, get it. You won't be disappointed. The book provides the historic context necessary to understanding this important period.

I've read David Levering Lewis' WHEN HARLEM WAS IN VOGUE several times, and am always fascinated by it. As previous reviewers note, the writing is exacting and very detailed, but I found that this methodical approach very vividly recreates the world of the Harlem Renaissance: this is one those rare books which manages to succeed in both it's academic rigor, and it's vivid, cinematic detail. It sent me back into many of the writers, some still well-known, many unfortunately not.

The book doesn't try to answer all the questions it raises, and it shouldn't - the subject is far too historically rich for one book. Still, the suggestions of class divisions within African-American communities are danced around here, and Lewis could have ventured a bit more deeply into that.

His cutoff with the Great Depression likewise seems a bit neat: Harlem's notorious decline is a vast and tragic subject unto itself, but Lewis does devote a little time to some of the roots of that decline - which were evident even in the waning days of the renaissance.

Still, there are many provocative accomplishemnts here - you will find the genesis of many strands of African-American art and political thought in the movement, and they are explored in detail here, and this great, vast introductory work is an excellent jumping-off point for further reading.

-David Alston

I have not had the opportunity to read this selection. I am interested in the Harlem Renaissance and will read this at first chance.

This book can be described as a history book for the historians for the simple fact that it has too much information for the regular reader. The book reads more like a text book then anything. The author will mention name after name, but without giving proper introduction of who the people are, leaving the reader lost unless they know their history to a great length. The book also has some shortcomings on how much of it is about harlem, rather it is about the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance. As the preface mentions the book could have been subtitled (or titled) Civil Rights by copywrite. This would have been a more fitting title for the author focuses more on the great literature at the time and its authors then anything else. While the book has a ton of facts, and an indepth look into many works, I failed to gain much insight into the events that the book is writing about.

Interesting to see about the actual people who were involved in the Harlem Renaissance, but the author uses so many names that it gets confusing.