Fiction: A Vibrant Voice in the Harlem Renaissance Harlem Renaissance was a social movement after the World War I. It happened when the blacks from various backgrounds—uneducated southerners coming from the Great Migration to the north, the soldiers returning from World War I, and the already educated blacks, all of whom sought their own identity and a place for them in the northern cities. Harlem, a small town in New York, became a cultural center, and a nurturing place for black literature. The Harlem Renaissance unearthed an astonishing amount of black literal talents, such as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Zora Nelle Hurston, and Nella Larsen. These astounding black writers became part of the Harlem Renaissance, celebrating black culture,
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E. B Du Bois and Alain Locke, who envisioned “an established black identity, contoured to project a noble, sophisticated persona, would allow African Americans to operate effectively within the framework of the white establishment, meeting whites on equal terms”. The black intellectuals wanted the writers to show their literacy and aesthetic creativity which corresponded with the white counterparts. In a sense, the black intellectuals wanted to uplift blacks’ image by conforming to the white writers. Langston Hughes, the leader of the writers during Harlem Renaissance, in his work “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, argued that the black writers were trying so hard to resemble their white counterparts and fit in to the white society that they have degraded parts of their own culture and heritage. This shift toward celebration of traditional black culture began after the publication of Cane by Jean Toomer, which was a mixture of poems, short stories, dialogues, and vignettes, describing an urban black man trying to find his roots and going back home. Through Cane, Toomer not only inspired other writers by the ambitious structure of the novel, he also ignited a new trend of how black writers expressed
E. B Du Bois and Alain Locke, who envisioned “an established black identity, contoured to project a noble, sophisticated persona, would allow African Americans to operate effectively within the framework of the white establishment, meeting whites on equal terms”. The black intellectuals wanted the writers to show their literacy and aesthetic creativity which corresponded with the white counterparts. In a sense, the black intellectuals wanted to uplift blacks’ image by conforming to the white writers. Langston Hughes, the leader of the writers during Harlem Renaissance, in his work “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, argued that the black writers were trying so hard to resemble their white counterparts and fit in to the white society that they have degraded parts of their own culture and heritage. This shift toward celebration of traditional black culture began after the publication of Cane by Jean Toomer, which was a mixture of poems, short stories, dialogues, and vignettes, describing an urban black man trying to find his roots and going back home. Through Cane, Toomer not only inspired other writers by the ambitious structure of the novel, he also ignited a new trend of how black writers expressed