14 - George Schuyler and Wallace Thurman: two satirists of the Harlem Renaissance

Summary

One of the effects of the Harlem Renaissance was to bring people of disparate backgrounds together in common cause. Such was the case with George Schuyler and Wallace Thurman, two of the era's major satirists. Schuyler was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1895 and raised in Syracuse, New York. He started writing while serving in the United States Army and moved on to a long and controversial career that lasted until his death in 1977. Wallace Thurman was born (1902) and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah; he was educated at both the University of Utah and the University of Southern California before coming to New York City in 1925. Thurman's career was both exceptional and tragically short; he died of tuberculosis in 1934. Despite their different backgrounds, both writers ended up moving in important Harlem Renaissance literary and intellectual circles from 1925 onwards. By the same token, both Schuyler and Thurman ended up adopting significant and very complex roles as intellectual champions of some of the movement's prime ideals and as satirical excoriators on the age's foibles and excesses. Thurman and Schuyler took seriously the discussions of race and culture that circulated all around them, but they refused to see the major social and aesthetic concerns of the time as anything that could be easily understood, corrected, or improved. Their interventions into the political and artistic discourses of the 1920s and 30s were meant to counteract the romanticization of Harlem at that time and provide for their readers a healthy skepticism toward issues of race, color, nationalism, and conformism.