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THE SLEEPER WAKES -- HARLEM RENAISSANCE STORIES BY WOMEN |
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NOTES 1. Historians disagree slightly as to the specific dates that mark the beginning and end of the Harlem Renaissance, although they basically concur that it spanned the years between World War I and World War II. Nathan Irvin Huggins and David Levering Lewis agree that 1919 was the year the Harlem Renaissance began; Bruce Kellner cites 1917 as the opening year. Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Bruce Kellner, ed., The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary for the Era (New York: Methuen, 1984). 2. Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue, 20. 3. Cary D. Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance (Houston: Rice University Press, 1988), 46. 4. Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 7. 5. Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue, 48. 6. Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 194. 7. Copies of this magazine are available in facsimile form: Wallace Thurman, Fire!! (Metuchen, N.J.: Fire!! Press, 1982). 8. Kellner, The Harlem Renaissance, 293. 9. Jessie Fauset and Gwendolyn Bennett also achieved success in Paris, as well as in the United States. See Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). 10. A recent biography (Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time [New York: Vintage, 1989]) and a movie about her life John Kemeny, The Josephine Baker Story [New York: Home Box Office and Anglia Television, 1991]) have given Baker even more prominence today. The movie, produced for HBO viewers, is now available from video rental stores. 11. Kellner, The Harlem Renaissance, 227. 12. Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem 1900-1950 (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1981), 276. 13. Information regarding Augusta Savage is taken from Kellner, The Harlem Renaissance, 315. 14. David Driskell, "The Flowering of the Harlem Renaissance," in the Studio Museum in Harlem's Harlem Renaissance Art of Black America (New York: Abrams, 1987), 108. Subsequent information regarding Meta Warrick Fuller in this introduction is drawn largely from this source. 15. Driskell, Harlem Renaissance Art of Black America, 108. 16. Mary Schmidt Campbell, Introduction to the Studio Museum in Harlem's Harlem Renaissance Art of Black America, 27. 17. Although this book dwells mostly on the male promoters, Cary Wintz's Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance shows the relationship several of these women had to both male and female Renaissance writers. He also includes several useful charts that show which companies published specific works. 18. Anderson, This Was Harlem, 231. 19. Gloria Hull documents the importance and impact of these literary evenings with quotes from various writers who profited from them. Color Sex and Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 165-166. 20. David Levering Lewis attributes Fauset's resignation from The Crisis to a financial dispute, arising out of a twenty-five hundred dollar loan made by Fauset and her sister to W.E.B. DuBois. Lewis also discusses the deterioration of The Crisis as a consequence of Fauset's departure in When Harlem Was in Vogue, 199. 21. Carolyn Wedin Sylvander, Jessie Redmon Fauset: Black American Writer, (Troy, NY.: Whitson, 1981),60. 22. Carolyn Sylvander credits Fauset with discovering and encouraging Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay. Sylvander, Jessie Redmon Fauset, 59. 23. For a discussion of Modernism in relationship to the Harlem Renaissance, see Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism in the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Bonnie Kime Scott, ed., The Gender of Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 24. For more information on Bennett's and Fauset's relationship with Paris, see Fabre, From Harlem to Paris. 25. James Baldwin's story "Stranger in the Village" is a later example of a text which explores this theme. 26. Hull, Color Sex and Poetry, 197. 27. Joyce Flynn, Introduction, Frye Street and Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), xvi. 28. Grimke's poetry which appears in Maureen Honey, Shadowed Dreams (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989) provides clearer evidence of her lesbian identity. 29. For the publication dates of these stories I have followed Gloria Hull, the editor of Dunbar-Nelson's collected works. These stories were reprinted for the first time in volume 3 of The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, 3 vols., ed. Gloria Hull, Schomburg Series (New York, Oxford University Press, 1988). 30. In her discussion of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Gloria Hull elaborates on these similarities (Color, Sex, and Poetry, 51-52). 31. Her two novels are available in a single-volume edition: Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing, ed. Deborah McDowell (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986). 32. In an effort to discover what actually took place, the play, the story, and the relevant correspondence between Hughes and Hurston have recently been reprinted: see Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, ed. George Houston Bass and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). 33. The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). This series contains over forty volumes of works from the nineteenth century.
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