Wallace Thurman: Renaissance Man
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 lif...