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Our strong community of black writers today stems from the glorious explosion of culture known as the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance changed how people viewed African Americans and how they viewed themselves. Not only did writers emerge, but artists, musicians, entertainers and other cultural leaders create an era that has not been matched.

The Harlem urban setting, in New York City provided the energy and creativity to influence music, art, and literature through the 20th century and its influence continues today. impression body of literature. Claude McKay, Langston Hughes,Countee Cullen,Jessie Redmon Fauset, Rudolf Fisher, Sterling A. Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, and Jean Toomer were just some of the writers who are remembered for their contributions to the Harlem Renaissance.

African Americans found an identity and then a social consciousness, a role to play in the United States as well as other locations through the world.Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen, traveled to Europe and found a reading audience that was just as formidable as they created back in the United States.

The stock market crash of 1929, the Great Depression, and the economic downturn of the nation affected and ultimately ended the period of the Harlem Renaissance. Yet, the force of the Harlem Renaissance, nevertheless, created a powerful current that picked up strength throughout the time of the migration of Blacks from the rural south to the urban north for jobs and economic survival.

Now there was a body of African-American literature from the Harlem Renaissance that was different than the literature that preceded it. This energy from the literary renaissance, the legacy of Claude McKay, Langston Hughes,Countee Cullen, and others inspired Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright to pursue literary careers in the late 1930s and the 1940s. The Harlem Renaissance, followed by historical events, built a self-determination that created a basis for the Civil Rights struggles in the 1950s and 1960s.

This spirit had the power to propel later writers through tumultuous decades to maintain momentum through the century. The African-American literature of the 1980s and 1990s by such writers as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison were also influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance inspired a national community of black writers that have a prominent position in the fabric of American Literature today.

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