Fire!!

About

Wallace Thurman's Fire!! — named after the short-lived 1926 Harlem Renaissance literary magazine he co-founded with Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston — is a document of that movement's most radical self-assertion: the magazine refused the respectability politics of the older generation and published work on sexuality, prostitution, and Black working-class life that the NAACP found embarrassing. The dramatic material in this collection reflects Thurman's provocative vision of what Black literature could be, and its historical importance as a founding artifact of the Harlem Renaissance exceeds its current profile.