Zora Neale Hurston was a utopian, who believed that black Americans could attain sovereignty from white American society and all its bigotry, as proven by her hometown of Eatonville. She was born in 1891 and her father was a Baptist preacher, tenant farmer, and carpenter. At age three her family moved to Eatonville, Fla., the first incorporated black community in America. Her father would also become mayor of that town. In her writings she would glorify Eatonville as a utopia where black Americans could live independent of the prejudices of white society. Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist and an authority on black culture from the Harlem Renaissance. In this artistic movement of the 1920s black artists moved from traditional dialectical works and imitation of white writers to explore their own culture and affirm pride in their race. Zora Neale Hurston pursued this objective by combining literature with anthropology. She first gained attention with her short stories such as "John Redding Goes to Sea" and "Spunk" which appeared in black literary magazines. After several years of anthropological research financed through grants and fellowships, Zora Neale Hurston's first novel Jonah's Gourd Vine was published in 1934 to critical success. In 1935, her book Mules and Men, which investigated voodoo practices in black communities in Florida and New Orleans, also brought her kudos. The publication of what is considered Hurston's greatest novel was Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. Published works by Hurston over the next ten years either received mixed reviews or failed according to literary standards. Zora Neale Hurston never addressed the issue of racism of whites toward blacks, and as this became a developing theme among black writers in the post World War II ear of civil rights, Hurston's literary influence faded. She further scathed her own reputation by railing the civil rights movement and supporting ultraconservative politicians. She died in poverty and obscurity in 1960.

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902. However, he lived with his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas until he was thirteen when his grandmother died. He went to live with his mother in Lincoln, Illinois. This is where Hughes wrote his first verse and was named class poet of his eighth grade class. Although his family constantly relocated, Langston remained in Lincoln, Illinois to finish high school. During that time, his writing talent was recognized by his high school teachers and classmates. As a result, Hughes had his first pieces of verse published in the school's sophisticated magazine. Soon he was on the staff and publishing in the magazine regularly. An English teacher introduced him to poets such as Carl Sandburg and Walk Whitman, and these became Hughes' earliest influences. Langston Hughes moved to New York to attend Columbia University for college. Hughes only spent one year at Columbia before being swept into the exciting and newly formed Harlem environment. Here Langston Hughes flourished and being amongst the jazz and blues helped to influence Hughes' lyrical style. Immediately, Hughes became an integral part of the arts scene in Harlem, so much so that in many ways he defined the spirit of the age, from a literary point of view. He got to know other writers of the time such as Countee Cullen, Claude McCay, W.E.B. DuBois, and James Weldon Johnson. When his poem "The Weary Blues" won first prize in the poetry section of the 1925 Opportunity magazine literary contest, Hughes's literary career was launched. His first volume of poetry, also titled The Weary Blues, appeared in 1926. Setting himself apart from other writers, jazz and blues allowed him to experiment with a very rhythmic free verse. Hughes's primary writing was for the theater. His drama called, "Mulatto" - became the longest running Broadway play written by an African American until Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun" (1958). Langston Hughes died in 1967.

Born in Washington, DC in the late nineteenth century, Fisher grew up in Providence, Rhode Island and graduated from Classical High School. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Brown University in 1919 and received a Master of Arts in biology a year later. He went on to attend Howard University Medical School and graduated in 1924. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and other honorary societies; he won prizes for performances in his German classes, for public speaking, and for his work in rhetoric and English composition. During his senior year he was elected a commencement-day speaker. By the time he finished medical school, Fisher had started at least four short stories, which were all eventually published. His first and still one of his most popular, "The City of Refuge", was submitted to Atlantic Monthly during the spring of his senior year. It was published the following year. Fisher graduated with highest honors from medical school in 1924, interned for a year at Freedman's Hospital, and won a research fellowship, which supported him from September 1925 to October 1927. In 1926 his lengthy story "High Yaller" won the Amy Spingarn Prize for fiction. In just a few short years, Rudolph Fisher had distinguished himself in the study of medicine and in the writing of short fiction. He was among the few doctors who practiced in the new field of X-ray technology and among the very few African Americans who practiced the specialty between 1920 and 1940. In 1934, Fisher died after 3 unsuccessful stomach surgeries to which is now being called cancer.


Claude McKay was born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, the son of farmers. The youngest of eleven children, McKay was sent at an early age to live with his oldest brother, a schoolteacher, so that he could be given the best education available. McKay was an avid reader who began to write poetry at the age of ten. In 1907, McKay came to the attention of Walter Jekyll, an English gentleman residing in Jamaica who became his mentor. Mr. Jekyll encouraged McKay to write dialect verse. Jekyll later set some of McKay's verse to music. Two volumes of Jamaican dialect verse, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads were published in 1912. By then he was just 22 years old. Mc Kay immigrated to the U.S. to attend Tuskegee Institute after hearing about the work of Booker T. Washington. In no time, the shock of American racism turned him from the conservatism of his youth. Much of his writings are a reflection of that shock he felt about American racism. He also attended Kansas State Teachers College between 1912 and 1914. McKay moved to New York in 1914, where he contributed regularly to The Liberator, the leading journal of avant-garde politics and art at that time. With the publication of two volumes of poetry, Spring in New Hampshire (1920) and Harlem Shadows (1922), McKay emerged as the first and most militant voice of the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, identified McKay as a leading inspirational force, even though he did not write modern verse. His work was lyrically prosed and he also published sonnets. After 1922, McKay lived successively in the Soviet Union, France, Spain, and Morocco. While in the Soviet Union he compiled his journalistic essays into a book, The Negroes in America, which was not published in the United States until 1979. McKay wanted readers to know about the vitality and essential health of the uprooted black vagabonds of urban America and Europe. Claude McKay wrote a novel called Home to Harlem (1928) that became the most popular novel written by an African American at that time. After returning to America in 1934, McKay was attacked by the Communists for repudiating their dogmas and by liberal whites and blacks for his criticism of integrationist-oriented civil rights groups. McKay advocated full civil liberties and racial solidarity. He wrote for various magazines and newspapers, including the New Leader and the New York Amsterdam News. He also wrote an autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937), and a study, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). In 1944, he relocated to Chicago and died in 1948 due to congestice heart failure. His second autobiography, My Green Hills of Jamaica, was published after Mc Kay died, in 1979.

top ↑