Harlem Renaissance / Edition 2

by Nathan Irvin Huggins, Arnold Rampersad

Overview

A finalist for the 1972 National Book Award, hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "brilliant" and "provocative," Nathan Huggins' Harlem Renaissance was a milestone in the study of African-American life and culture. Now this classic history is being reissued, with a new foreword by acclaimed biographer Arnold Rampersad.

As Rampersad notes, "Harlem Renaissance remains an indispensable guide to the facts and features, the puzzles and mysteries, of one of the most provocative episodes in African-American and American history." Indeed, Huggins offers a brilliant account of the creative explosion in Harlem during these pivotal years. Blending the fields of history, literature, music, psychology, and folklore, he illuminates the thought and writing of such key figures as Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and W.E.B. DuBois and provides sharp-eyed analyses of the poetry of Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Langston
Hughes. But the main objective for Huggins, throughout the book, is always to achieve a better understanding of America as a whole. As Huggins himself noted, he didn't want Harlem in the 1920s to be the focus of the book so much as a lens through which readers might see how this one moment in time sheds light on the American character and culture, not just in Harlem but across the nation. He strives throughout to link the work of poets and novelists not only to artists working in other genres and media but also to economic, historical, and cultural forces in the culture at large.

This superb reissue of Harlem Renaissance brings to a new generation of readers one of the great works in African-American history and indeed a landmark work in the field of American Studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195063363
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/02/2007
Edition description:	Updated Edition
Pages:	390
Sales rank:	451,053
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 5.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Nathan Irvin Huggins was W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of History and Afro-American Studies and Director of the Du Bois Institute at Harvard University until his death in 1989. His books include Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass, Black Odyssey: The African-American Ordeal in Slavery, and
Voices From the Harlem Renaissance. Arnold Rampersad is Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University and is the author of The Life of Langston Hughes, among other titles.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Arnold Rampersad
Introduction
Ch. 1: Harlem: Capital of the Black World
Ch. 2: The New Negro
Ch. 3: Heart of Darkness
Ch. 4: Art: The Black Identity
Ch. 5: Art: The Ethnic Province
Ch. 6: White/Black Faces - Black Masks
Epilogue
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"A significant contribution to cultural history....Huggins amply demonstrates [that] black and white culture and self-image in America are inextricably linked as one."—Robert Sklar, Journal of American History

"Still the most richly textured introduction to the diversity of voices in the Harlem Renaissance."—Susan Stanford Friedman, University of Wisconsin at Madison

"One of the most important volumes of intellectual history ever written about the episode in African-American life in the twentieth century."—Lamont H. Yeakey, Black Forum

From the Publisher