Thurman, Wallace

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Thurman, Wallace

August 16, 1902
December 22, 1934

Writer Wallace Thurman was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. His literary career began shortly after he left the University of Utah to study at the University of Southern California. Although his intent was to study medicine, Thurman soon rediscovered an earlier enthusiasm for writing. According to Arna Bontemps, whom he first met during this period, Thurman "lost sight of degrees" and began to pursue courses related to his interest in literature and writing. In Los Angeles he also wrote a column called "Inklings" for a local black newspaper. Having heard about the New Negro movement in New York, Thurman attempted to establish a West Coast counterpart to the Harlem Renaissance and began editing his own literary magazine, the Outlet. The publication lasted for only six months but was described by his friend Theophilus Lewis, the Harlem theater critic, as Thurman's "first and most successful venture at the editorial desk."

Dissatisfied, Thurman left for New York where, as he put it, he "began to live on Labor Day, 1925." Later he became known for his declaration that he was a man who hated "every damned spot in these United States outside of Manhattan Island." In New York Thurman secured his first position, as an editorial assistant at the Looking Glass, another small, short-lived review. His first important position was as temporary editor for the leftist Messenger, published by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen. When the managing editor, George Schuyler, went on leave,

Thurman's role provided him with a forum not only for his own work but for that of other nascent Renaissance talent, including Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West.

When Schuyler returned, Thurman became associated with a white publication, the World Tomorrow, and at the same time joined a group of young black writers and artists—Hurston, Hughes, Aaron Douglas, John P. Davis, Bruce Nugent, and Gwendolyn Bennett—to launch "a new experimental quarterly," Fire, in 1926. The purpose of Fire, according to its founders, was to "burn up a lot of the old, dead conventional Negro-white ideas of the past, épater la bourgeoisie into the realization of the existence of the younger Negro writers and artists." Yet Thurman's enduring ambition to become editor of "a financially secure magazine" seemed ill fated. Fire itself became a casualty of a real fire in a basement where several hundred copies had been stored, and the disaster led to its demise after the first issue. Thurman's next editorial venture came two years later, when he began publishing Harlem, a Forum of Negro Life. Although the magazine lasted a little longer than its predecessor, it too folded due to a lack of funds.

Thurman also wrote critical articles on African-American life and culture for such magazines as the New Republic, the Independent, the Bookman, and Dance Magazine. The black writer, he contended, had left a "great deal of fresh, vital material untouched" because of his tendency to view his own people as "sociological problems rather than as human beings." Like Hughes, he criticized those writers who felt "that they must always exhibit specimens from the college rather than from the kindergarten, specimens from the parlor rather than from the pantry." He exhorted black writers to exploit those authentic and unique aspects of black life and culture ignored by writers who suppressed the seamy or sordid or low-down, common aspects of black existence.

Thurman published his first novel, The Blacker the Berry (1929) while on the staff of MacFadden Publications. Although the book was acclaimed by the critics, the author remained characteristically skeptical of his own efforts. Doubtless invoking some of his own experiences, Thurman's novel deals with the problems of a dark-skinned woman who struggles with intraracial schisms caused by colorism. Later that same year Thurman collaborated with a white writer, William Jourdan Rapp, on the play Harlem, which opened at the Apollo Theater. Thurman based the plot and dialogue on his short story "Cordelia the Crude," which was originally published in Fire. The play was described by Hughes as "a compelling study … of the impact of Harlem on a Negro family fresh from the south." After its production Thurman continued to write prolifically, sometimes ghostwriting popular "true confessions" fiction.

In 1932 Thurman published his second novel, Infants of the Spring, an autobiographical roman à clef, documenting the period from a contemporary perspective. The novel is a biting satire and poignant critique of the Harlem Renaissance. For Thurman, the failure of the movement lay in the race consciousness emanating from the literary propagandists on the one hand and the assimilationists on the other, both undermining any expression of racial authenticity and individuality.

His final novel, The Interne, written in collaboration with Abraham L. Furman, was also published in 1932. It was a muckraking novel exposing the corrupt conditions in City Hospital in New York. Both of these novels were published by Macaulay, where Thurman became editor in chief in 1932. Two years later he negotiated a contract with Foy Productions to write scenarios for two films, High School Girl and Tomorrow's Children. But the strain of life in Hollywood took its toll on Thurman, who became ill and returned to New York in the spring of 1934. Not only had he been marked by a certain physical fragility, he had also been plagued with chronic alcoholism. Shortly after his return Thurman was taken to City Hospital, the very institution he had written about in The Interne. After remaining for six months in the incurable ward, he died of consumption on December 22, 1934.

Thurman had arrived in New York in 1925 at the peak of the Harlem Renaissance, whose rise and ebb paralleled his own life and career. He early became one of the leading critics of the older bourgeoisie, both black and white; his lifestyle and literary criticism were calculated to outrage their sensibilities and articulate a New Negro attitude toward the black arts. His importance to the Harlem Renaissance can be measured in terms of both his literary contributions and his influence on younger and perhaps more successful writers of the period. His criticism also set a standard of judgment for subsequent scholars of the Harlem Renaissance. Perhaps his evaluation of Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925), a collection inaugurating the movement, best summarizes his own life and contribution: "In [The New Negro ] are exemplified all the virtues and all the faults of this new movement." Thurman's life itself became a symbol of the possibilities and limitations of the Harlem Renaissance.