Wallace Thurman

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Wallace Henry Thurman (August 16, 1902 – December 22, 1934) was an American novelist active during the Harlem Renaissance.

He also wrote essays, served as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals.

He is best known for his book The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores misdoing within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more coveted.

Early life

Thurman was born in Salt Lake City to Beulah and Oscar Thurman. His father left his wife and son when Thurman was less than a month old. Wallace didn't know his father until he was 30 years old. Wallace and his mother died in Salt Lake City with Emma Jackson, his maternal grandmother, amid his mother's many marriages. Jackson owned a saloon from her house, selling alcohol without a permit.

Thurman's youth was marred by poverty, family breakdown, and sickness. He began grade school in Boise, Idaho, at the age of six, but he later went back to school for two years, when he returned to his grandmother Emma in Salt Lake City. Thurman lived in Chicago from 1910 to 1914. He attended grammar school in Omaha, Nebraska, with his mother. During this period, he suffered from recurrent heart attacks. Thurman caught influenza during the global Influenza Pandemic in Pasadena, California, in the winter of 1918. He recovered and returned to Salt Lake City, where he attended high school.

Thurman was a voracious reader. Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, and many others. At the age of 10, he wrote his first book at ten years old. He attended the University of Utah from 1919 to 1920 as a pre-medical student. He went to the University of Southern California in 1922 but left without a degree.

He encountered and befriended writer Arna Bontemps and became a reporter and columnist for a black-owned newspaper while in Los Angeles. Outlet, He founded Outlet, which was intended to be a West Coast counterpart to The Crisis, which is managed by the NAACP.

Personal life

Thurman was arrested in New York a short time after he had sex with a male. He denied being gay and feared that others would discover that he was not aware of him.

On August 22, 1928, Thurman married Louise Thompson. The marriage lasted only six months. Wallace was a homosexual, according to Thompson, who refused to acknowledge it. They had no children together.

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Career

Thurman moved to Harlem in 1925. He wrote books, films, and articles during the next decade as a ghostwriter, a publisher, and editor. In 1926, he became the editor of The Messenger, a socialist newspaper that was a black journal. Langston Hughes' adult-themed stories were the first to be published. Thurman left the journal in October 1926 to become the editor of World Tomorrow, a white owned newspaper. He continued to work on the development of Fire!! magazine the following month. The Younger Negro Artists were voted in favour of the Younger Negro Artists. Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, Aaron Douglas, and Gwendolyn B. Bennett were among the many contributors.

Fire! was able to only have one issue published. It was impossible to find such figures as W. E. B. B. Du Bois and African Americans who had been campaigning for socioeconomic justice and racial integration. Thurman chastised them for thinking that black art should be used as propaganda for those ends. According to him, the New Negro movement expended too much time trying to tell white Americans that black Americans were honorable and not inferior.

Thurman and others of the "Niggerati" (the intentionally inflammatory term used for the young African American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance) wanted to capture African Americans' lives, both good and bad. According to Thurman, black artists should fully acknowledge and celebrate the arduous conditions of African American life.

As Singh and Scott wrote,

Thurman's flat in a rooming house on 267 West 136th Street in Harlem became the central meeting place for African-American literary avant-garde and experimental artists during this period. The room was mocked by Thurman and Hurston, who jokingly referred to it as "Niggerati Manor." He had painted the walls red and black, which were the colors he used on the back of Fire!! The walls were painted by Nugent, with some of which contained homogenetic material.

Thurman was asked to edit a magazine called Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life in 1928, and its contributors included Alain Locke, George Schuyler, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. He had only two issues. Thurman, then, became a reader for a major New York publishing company, becoming the first African American to work in such a role.

Thurman was described by Langston Hughes as "a curiously brilliant black boy, who had read everything but whose critical mind could have found something wrong with everything he read." Thurman's dark skin color attracted controversy, including negative reactions from both black and white Americans. In his books, he disparaged the black community's preference for its lighter-skinned members.

Thurman wrote Harlem, a play that debuted on Broadway in 1929 to mixed reviews. Frieda Fishbein, his theatre agent, was on hand. His first book The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) was published in the same year. The book has been regarded as a pioneer of fiction due to its emphasis on intra-racial discrimination and colorism within the black community, where lighter skin has traditionally been favoured.

Infants of the Spring (1932), a satire of the Harlem Renaissance's themes and characters, was published three years later by Thurman. With Abraham L. Furman, a white man, he co-authored his last book, The Interne (1932).

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