The Crisis Reader : Stories, Poetry, and Essays from the N.A.A.C.P.'s Crisis Magazine (Harlem Renaissance Series)

Rating:
Summary: Best Guide for Studying the Harlem Renaissance
Review: Editor Sondra K. Wilson's collection of stories, poetry, and essays culled from the archives of W.E.B. DuBois/NAACP's Crisis Magazine are among the best and most influential in shaping the direction of the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age. The poetry includes some of the most outspoken and radical members: Sterling Brown, Countee Cullen, Arna Bontemps (a close friend of Langston Hughes), Hughes, Fauset, McKay... The list goes on. The fiction is one of my favorite collections and I reread it often for pleasure even though I originally bought the book to supplement the reading material for a college course on the Harlem Renaissance. Of particular interest are the stories of Marita O. Bonner, Jessie Fauset, and Rudolph Fisher's "High Yaller".

The most important aspect of the book, however, is the literary, cultural, and social essays. W.E.B. DuBois's firebomb essay "Criteria of Negro Art" is a highlight as is James Weldon Johnson's essay "Negro Authors and White Publihsers" which gets to the heart of the relationship between many of the white patrons from downtown Manhattan and their black artist counterparts.

This guide is as much a Who's Who of the Harlem Renaissance as it is a cornerstone to Black Studies. It is difficult to find back issues of Crisis in local libraries outside of New York or college libraries and even when looking through archives, it was difficult to separate the influential articles over the everyday. Sondra Wilson deserves high praise for this outstanding collection.