Book Description

In this ground-breaking collection of literary biographies, many with pictures, authors Lorraine Elena Roses and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph chronicle the lives and works of 100 black women novelists, short-story writers, playwrights, poets, essayists, critics, historians, journalists, and editors writing in the United States between 1900 and 1945. Here are insightful portraits of famous black women, among them Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Angelina Weld Grimké;, Mary Eliza Church Terrell, and Ida Bell Wells-Barnett. Here, too, are many thoughtful profiles of neglected writers--their works deserving to be rescued from obscurity. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with the writers and their families, The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond traces its subjects' contributions to literature, their concerns about race and gender, their common themes, their relationships with artistic contemporaries, and the influence of these early writers on their modern-day counterparts in American literature.