Among one of the most prolific artists of the Harlem Renaissance was Wallace Thurman. Author, novelist, publisher, editor, dramatist and all-around intellectual, his colleague and friend, Langston Hughes said of Thurman that he was a "strangely brilliant black boy who had read everything, and whose critical mind could find something wrong with everything he read" (1). Thurman would become one of the principal contributors to and sponsors of the Harlem Renaissance creative energy. Among the first to initiate a 'salon' of artists who included Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McCay, Arna Bontemps, and Bruce Nugent, Thurman tried twice to create a literary publication that would capture the energetic zeitgeist of the time. He was asked to edit a literary magazine called Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life--which lasted only two issues; and Fire!! with Hughes and Hurston, but the magazine unfortunately ended after one issue was published. Scholars have reflected that the short life of the publication may have been attributable to Thurman's critique of W.E.B. DuBois's credo that all African American art should serve a propagandist role.
On his own, Thurman offered terse commentary on the literary age and context of the Renaissance. His novel, Infants of the Spring caricatured many of the major figures of the time, one of whom was Zora Neale Hurston--recast as the fictitious Sweetie Mae Carr--a vapid would-be artist and hanger-on who was all flash and little substance. His other notable work was The Blacker the Berry: A Story of Negro Life, which took a hard and critical look at intra-racial discrimination and color consciousness within the black community.
