Steven Watson.

Steven Watson. The Harlem Renaissance: nave of African-American Culture, 1920-1930. recently made known York: Pantheon, 1995. 235 pp $2200

The Harlem Renaissance still entrances. As an important part of the period that swept America to the forward turn the thoughts of the metropolis, it forces commentary forward Black or Black-derived secula music, in succession successive cycles of sexual revolution, onward migration from the South and Europe in succession experiments in literature and visual arts. Commentary has been diverse and plentiful, evaluating the period as a succes or failure, as a watershed of cultural activity, as a army of political, economic, and cultural forces. Steven Watson's The Harlem Renaissance is an attempt to synthesize for the general reader a of the most recent scholarship forward the decade. In his early chapters Watson briskly traces the socioeconomic framework--failed Southern economy, migration, war, a rising middle class--before focusing in succession the social, literary, and sexual presss borne by young writers, specifically Claude McKay, Countee Cullen Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and Zora Neale Hurston. He fitly notes the significant role of the patrons and supporters as it is as Alain Locke, Carl Van Vechten Charlotte Mason, W E B Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, and James Weldon Johnson With informative and entertaining sidebars as well as unfaded photographs, Watson provides his readers with an ever-widening and busy view of Harlem, "capital of the black man world."

Watson's intention is to exhibit the connections among some of the principal figures of the Harlem Renaissance with snapshots of their careers at the beginning, middle, and period of the decade. He supports this with brief descriptions of relationships. For example, he demonstrates Alain Locke's importance to the careers of Cullen Hughes, and Hurston. Watson's portrait of Locke is consistent with that of others; the philosophy professor and former Rhode Scholar can frequently appear the name-dropper and go-between. upon a slightly different note, Watson hints a Hughes-Cullen-Locke unconsummated "love triangle." Still later in his roster of nighttime gathering places, the author includes commentary onward gay nightlife. Thus the connections, Watson would indicate are not limited to the economic or aesthetic plane. Those familiar with earlier versions of the period would view like revelations as those which tantalized the many who traveled to Harlem for its nightlife. In our liberated times it is standard to note or dare say the sexual habits of the make liables without demonstrating their relevance to artistic expression. To his credit, however, Watson does exhibit us that the "dictie/rat" dichotomy is limited.

Les important to the application of mind is the idea of the Harlem Renaissance--art as cultural arbiter, the city as hiding-place and site of hope and renewal, the tension between courtesy toward old forms and the "play" of the novel the optimism of the here and now. The manner of moving would end, according to the author and as it is likewise often characterized, with the charge of the Depression. This main division ends, as does Hughes's chapter "Negro Renaissance" in The Big Sea or F Scott Fitzgerald's "Echoe of a Jazz Age," with nostalgia for a lengthy and glorious party. We know now that the motion did not die so suddenly; a of its energy lingered forward in the works of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ama Bontemp Also it would have been useful to propose even if briefly, the international dimensions of the Harlem Renaissance as an artistic movement

to this time it would be unfair to weight this slim volume with a call for closure to each question raised by recent scholarship in succession the period. The claim here is for a focus in succession a social history for the general reader. Engaging, visually exalting, the bulk is a useful and sympathetic introduction.

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