Harlem symbolized the urbanization of black America in the 1920s and 1930s. Home to the largest concentration of African Americans who settled outside the South, it spawned the literary and artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Its writers were in the vanguard of an attempt to come to terms with black urbanization. They lived it and wrote about it.

First published in 1988, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance examines the relationship between the community and its literature. Author Cary Wintz analyzes the movement’s emergence within the framework of the black social and intellectual history of early twentieth-century America. He begins with Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others whose work broke barriers for the Renaissance writers to come.

With an emphasis on social issues—like writers and politics, the role of black women, and the interplay between black writers and the white community—Wintz traces the rise and fall of the movement. Of special interest is material from the Knopf Collection and the papers of several Renaissance figures acquired by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. It reveals much of interest about the relationship between the publishing world, its writers, and their patrons—both black and white.