Harlem Renaissance: Four Novels of the 1930s: Not Without Laughter / Black No More / The Conjure-Man Dies / Black Thunder

Arna Bontemps

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The defiant energy of the New Negro Arts Movement that flourished between World War I and the Great Depression—more famously known as the Harlem Renaissance—was indelibly articulated by Langston Hughes: “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. . . . We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.” Hughes was just one of the novelists who transformed American literature with sometimes startling explorations of fresh subject matter—including such controversial themes as “passing” and color prejudice within the black community—and a defiant insistence that African American writers must speak for themselves.

Four Novels of the 1930s captures the diversity of genre and tone nourished by the Harlem Renaissance. Together, these novels form a vibrant and contentious collective portrait of African American culture in a moment of tumultuous change and great promise.

Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter —the poet’s only novel, is an elegiac, elegantly realized coming-of-age tale suffused with childhood memories of Missouri and Kansas—follows a young man from his rural origins to the big city.

George S. Schuyler’s Black No More , a satire founded on the science-fiction premise of a wonder drug permitting blacks to change their race, savagely caricatures public figures white and black alike in its raucous, carnivalesque send-up of American racial attitudes.

Considered the first detective story by an African American writer, Rudolph Fisher’s The Conjure-Man Dies is a mystery that comically mixes and reverses stereotypes, placing a Harvard-educated African “conjure-man” at the center of a phantasmagoric charade of deaths and disappearances.

Black Thunder , Arna Bontemps’s stirring fictional recreation of Gabriel Prosser’s 1800 slave revolt, which, though unsuccessful, shook Jefferson’s Virginia to its core, marks a turn from aestheticism toward political militance in its exploration of African American history.