Harlem Renaissance: Four Novels of the 1930s (LOA 218): Not Without Laughter / Black No More / The Conjure-Man Dies / Black Thunder-Fast Shipping

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HARLEM RENAISSANCE: Four Novels of the 1930s traces the flowering ofthe Renaissance in diverse genres and forms. It opens with LangstonHughes’s
Not Without Laughter (1931), an elegantlyrealized coming-of-age tale that follows a young man from his ruralorigins to the big city. Suffused with childhood memories, it is thepoet’s only novel. George S. Schuyler’s
Black No More (1931), a satire founded on the science fiction premise of a wonderdrug permitting blacks to change their race, skewers public figureswhite and black alike in a raucous, carnivalesque send-up of Americanracial attitudes. Considered the first detective story by an AfricanAmerican writer, Rudolph Fisher’s
The Conjure-Man Dies (1932) is a mystery that comically mixes and reverses stereotypes,placing a Harvard-educated African “conjureman” at the center of aphantasmagoric charade of deaths and disappearances.
BlackThunder (1936), Arna Bontemps’s stirring fictional recreationof Gabriel Prosser’s 1800 slave revolt, which, though unsuccessful,shook Jefferson’s Virginia to its core, marks a turn from aestheticismtoward political militancy in its exploration of African Americanhistory.

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