"A NEW, MODERN AFRICAN AMERICAN AESTHETIC": FIRST EDITION OF WALLACE THURMAN'S FIRST NOVEL, THE BLACKER THE BERRY. 1929, IN THE VERY RARE ORIGINAL DUST JACKET

THURMAN, Wallace. The Blacker the Berry… A Novel of Negro Life. New York: Macaulay, 1929. Octavo, original brown cloth, original dust jacket. $22,500.

First edition of the first book by Thurman, whose brilliantly satiric works inspired a "revolt against establishment arts" of the Harlem Renaissance, praised by Langston Hughes as a mischievously "gorgeous book," in the rare original dust jacket.

Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston together challenged many of the cultural assumptions of the Harlem Renaissance, seeking "to fashion a new, modern African American aesthetic" (Nadell, Enter the New Negroes, 78). A boldly innovative editor and writer, Thurman arrived in Harlem in 1925 and his home quickly became "the cradle of revolt against establishment arts… all the younger artists called Thurman their 'leader'—the fullest embodiment of outrageous, amoral independence among them" (Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was In Vogue, 193). He conceived and co-edited the 1926 journal Fire!! but is perhaps "best known for his 1929 novel The Blacker the Berry and his 1932 book Infants of Spring." The novel's heroine embodies his satiric attack on a "racial essentialism… that foregrounds color as a determining fact of life" (Cambridge Companion, 199, 205). "Relishing the mischief of The Blacker the Berry, Langston Hughes praised Thurman's 'gorgeous book'" (Levering Lewis, 238). In 1934, the tragic early deaths "of Thurman and fellow Harlem Renaissance writer Rudolph Fisher within days of each other marked for many the symbolic end of the Harlem Renaissance" (ANB). Blockson 4879.

Book very nearly fine, rare unrestored dust jacket very good with chipping along top edge, near foot of spine and at corners, mild soiling and toning.