Blacker the Berry

Wallace Thurman (1902 - 1934) was a Black novelist and figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Salt Lake City, Thurman was a lifelong reader and writer who completed his first novel at ten and read the likes of Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, and Charles Baudeliare. Moving to Harlem at the height of the Renaissance, Thurman had his hand in multiple literary productions such as The Messenger, World Tomorrow, and Fire!!!. A strong critic of the New Negro movement, Thurman found himself a part of the “Niggerati”—a group of Black artists and intellectuals who wanted to use their art to showcase African-American life as it authentically was whether good or bad—firmly against appealing to the Black middle class or the white gaze. Becoming one of the first Black readers at a major New York publishing house and experiencing prejudice on both sides of the color line, he felt moved to write The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life and three years later, Infants of Spring. Said by Langston Hughes to be, "...a strangely brilliant black boy, who had read everything and whose critical mind could find something wrong with everything he read,” Thurman was a complex and important voice in the Harlem Renaissance.