Wallace Thurman

Wallace Thurman

Wallace Henry Thurman (born August 16, 1902 in Salt Lake City , Utah , † December 22, 1934 in New York City ) was an American writer and an important representative of the Harlem Renaissance in African American literature .

Life

After attending school, Thurman briefly studied from 1919 to 1920 at the University of Utah and between 1922 and 1923 at the University of Southern California .

In the mid-1920s, he lived in Niggerati Manor , a well-known artist house in New York City that also housed other African American authors such as Richard Bruce Nugent and Langston Hughes . It was there that the idea arose to publish a quarterly magazine that should only represent the literature of young African American authors.

In the summer of 1926, he finally co-founded Fire !! magazine. , which was subtitled “devoted to the Younger Negro Artists” in accordance with the content objective. He also wrote literary contributions for the first and last edition in November 1926. The Financial Failure of the Fire !! -Magazine, which left all of its co-founders in debt for years, ultimately contributed to his alcoholism . Nonetheless, the magazine established the style of the Harlem Renaissance , a direction within Afro-American literature supported by the photographer Carl van Vechten , among others . From November 1928 he published the magazine Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life . Two issues appeared with contributions by Walter White , Langston Hughes , Georgia Douglas Johnson , Richard Bruce and others, after the second issue this magazine was also discontinued.

Wallace Thurman became one of the most important representatives of this literary group through his novels The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), Infants of the Spring (1932) and The Interne (1932). At the age of only 32 he finally died of complications from tuberculosis .

Web links

• Wallace Thurman in the nndb (English)