Langston Hughes

Harlem Renaissance Literature

The Harlem Renaissance was the most important literary and artistic movement in African American history. Centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City during the 1920s and 1930s, it brought Black writers, poets, musicians, and artists into the national spotlight for the first time. What the philosopher Alain Locke called "The New Negro" was more than a literary trend — it was a cultural declaration that African Americans would define themselves on their own terms, through their own art.

The movement's roots ran deeper than the 1920s. Paul Laurence Dunbar had been writing dialect poetry and fiction about Black life since the 1890s, and James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing" (1900) became known as the Black national anthem long before the Renaissance began. But it was the Great Migration — the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to northern cities — that concentrated the talent, energy, and audience that made Harlem the capital of Black culture. Langston Hughes arrived in 1921, Claude McKay's Harlem Shadows appeared in 1922, and by the mid-1920s, Harlem was producing some of the most vital literature in America.

This collection brings together the poets, novelists, short story writers, and editors who shaped the Harlem Renaissance and the tradition it created. You'll find Hughes's jazz-inflected verse alongside McKay's defiant sonnets, Hurston's dialect-rich fiction beside Toomer's experimental prose, and the editorial vision of Jessie Fauset that helped bring many of these writers to print. Together, they created a body of work that changed American literature permanently.

The Poets

  • Langston Hughes

    The voice of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes drew on jazz rhythms, blues music, and the everyday speech of Black America to create a poetry that was both accessible and revolutionary. His poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" was published when he was just nineteen. Other essential works include "Harlem" ("A Dream Deferred"), "Mother to Son", "I, Too", and the short story "Thank You, M'am" — one of the most widely taught stories in American schools.

  • Claude McKay

    Born in Jamaica, McKay became one of the Renaissance's most militant voices. His sonnet "If We Must Die" — written in response to the racial violence of the Red Summer of 1919 — is one of the most powerful protest poems in the English language. Winston Churchill later read it to rally British troops during World War II. McKay's "America" captures the painful duality of loving a country that refuses to love you back, while "The Harlem Dancer" offers an intimate portrait of Black nightlife.

  • Countee Cullen

    Where Hughes embraced jazz and vernacular speech, Cullen worked in traditional English verse forms — sonnets, ballads, and lyric poetry — to explore the African American experience. "Yet Do I Marvel" is a compact masterpiece that asks why God would "make a poet black, and bid him sing." His poem "Incident" captures the shattering experience of childhood racism in just twelve devastating lines, while "Heritage" wrestles with the pull of African identity.

  • James Weldon Johnson

    Poet, novelist, diplomat, civil rights leader, and the first African American professor at New York University — Johnson was a Renaissance man in every sense. His poem "Lift Every Voice and Sing" (1900), written for a celebration of Lincoln's birthday, became the anthem of the NAACP and is still known as the Black national anthem. As executive secretary of the NAACP during the 1920s, Johnson was also a crucial institutional force behind the Harlem Renaissance.

  • Paul Laurence Dunbar

    Dunbar died before the Harlem Renaissance began, but his work laid the groundwork for everything that followed. He was the first African American poet to gain wide national readership, publishing prolifically in both standard English and African American dialect. His poems — including "Encouragement" and "Mortality" — and his short stories like "The Scapegoat" and "The Boy and the Bayonet" explored Black life with a depth and humanity that opened doors for the Harlem generation.

The Prose Writers

  • Zora Neale Hurston

    Anthropologist, folklorist, and the most important female writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston's masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is now considered one of the greatest American novels, though it was largely forgotten until Alice Walker championed it in the 1970s. Her short fiction, including "Poker!", captures the rhythms and humor of Black Southern life with an ear trained by years of anthropological fieldwork in Florida and the Caribbean.

  • Jean Toomer

    Toomer's Cane (1923) is one of the most innovative works of the Harlem Renaissance — a hybrid of fiction, poetry, and drama that defied easy categorization. His short stories "Blood-Burning Moon", "Fern", and "Karintha" are lyrical, impressionistic portraits of Black life in the rural South and urban North, written in prose that often reads like poetry.

  • Nella Larsen

    Larsen explored the complexities of racial identity, class, and gender in her fiction. Her novella Passing (1929) — about two light-skinned Black women who navigate the color line in different ways — remains one of the most psychologically acute works of the Renaissance. Larsen was the first African American woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, though she published little after 1930.

  • Alice Dunbar-Nelson

    Poet, journalist, activist, and short story writer, Dunbar-Nelson (who was also Paul Laurence Dunbar's first wife) set much of her fiction in the Creole communities of New Orleans. Her stories — including "The Goodness of Saint Rocque", "Sister Josepha", "Mr. Baptiste", and "Little Miss Sophie" — capture a multiracial, multilingual world with vivid local color and emotional depth.

Editors, Essayists & Later Voices

  • Jessie Redmon Fauset

    As literary editor of The Crisis — the NAACP's magazine, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois — Fauset was the gatekeeper who first published Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen. Without her editorial eye, the Harlem Renaissance might never have found its audience. She was also a novelist in her own right, writing four novels that examined the Black middle class with a frankness unusual for the era.

  • Eugenia Collier

    Collier carried the Harlem Renaissance tradition forward into the mid-twentieth century. Her short story "Marigolds" (1969) — about a girl growing up in Depression-era poverty who destroys a neighbor's flower garden in a moment of rage — is one of the most widely anthologized African American short stories and a staple of school curricula across the country.

African American Library | 100 Great Short Stories | 100 Great American Poems