Harlem

Harlem, section of upper Manhattan, whose central area had 100,000 blacks in 1990. It was originally an independent village of Dutch settlers who named it for Haarlem, and was later a residential section for whites until it became predominantly black (c. 1914–18). The section figured in literature as early as J. W. Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex‐Colored Man (1912), and was widely exploited in the fiction and poetry of the 1920s, the era of the so‐called Harlem Renaissance. Leading authors of the period included Countee Cullen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, and Jean Toomer, and a major commentator on the blacks' situation was W.E.B. Du Bois. Writings by whites about the era include Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven, O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings, and Bodenheim's Naked on Roller Skates. Later black authors associated with Harlem include James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and LeRoi Jones.