Authors

American · 1902–1934

Wallace Thurman

Wallace Thurman was a Black American novelist, playwright, and editor who was one of the most brilliant and self-critical figures of the Harlem Renaissance. He co-founded the little magazine Fire!! (1926) with Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, explicitly rejecting the respectability politics of older Black cultural institutions. His novel Infants of the Spring (1932) is a satirical — and damning — portrait of the Harlem Renaissance itself. He died of tuberculosis at thirty-two.