Wallace Thurman

"...a strangely brilliant black boy, who had read everything and whose critical mind could find something wrong with everything he read."
-Langston Hughes
The Big Sea

Wallace Thurman was one of the most versitile writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Salt Lake City in 1902, he came to Harlem in 1925 following his graduation from the University of Southern California. The following year he became the editor of The Messenger and published one issue of the literary magazine Fire!!. The latter was a collaboration with other Harlem Renaissance authors, including Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. Fire!! was too cutting edge and a financial failure. Thurman took work as a journalist, a reader, an editor and a ghostwriter in an effort to pay the bills.

In 1929 his play Harlem debuted on Broadway. The same year his novel The Blacker the Berry.... Berry is a groundbreaking work because of its book-length focus on intraracial prejudice. Many Blacks did not like the public airing of "dirty laundry" but they could not stop themselves from reading it. Three years later Thurman published Infants of the Spring which satired the themes and the characters of the Harlem Renaissance. He co-authored a final novel with A.L. Furman, The Interne, that was also published in 1932. Years of heavy drinking and neglect began to take their toll. Thurman was hospitalized and died in 1934 from tuberculosis.