"Wallace Henry Thurman" [1902-1934]

Was an American novelist during the Harlem Renaissance.He is best known for his

novel The Blacker the Berry:A Novel of Negro Life,which explores discrimination among black people based on skin color.Wallace  was born in Salt Lake City to Beulah and Oscar Thurman.Between his mother's many marriage,he and his mother lived with Emma Jackson,his maternal grandmother.His grandmother home doubled as saloon where alcohol was served without a license.When he was less than a month old,his father abandoned his wife and son.It was not until Wallace was 30 that he met his father.His early life was marked by loneliness,family instability and illness.He began grade school grade school at age six school in Boise,Idaho,but his poor health led to a two-year absence from school,during which he returned to Salt Lake City.From 1910 to 1914,Wallace lived in Chicago,but he would have to finish grammar school in Omaha, Nebraska.During this time,he suffered from persistent heart attacks.While living in Pasadena,California lower altitude in the winter of 1918,Wallace came down with influenza during the worldwide Influenza Pandemic,Considering his history of illness,he surprisingly recovered and then returned to Salt Lake City,where he finished high school.Throughout it all,Wallace was a voracious reader.He enjoyed the works of Plato,Aristotle,Shakespeare,Havelock Ellis,Flaubert,Charles Baudelaire and many others.He even wrote his first novel at the age of 10.Wallace attended the University of Utah from 1919 to 1920  as a pre-medical student.In 1922 he transferred  to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles,but he left without earning a degree.While in Los Angeles,he met befriended Arna Bontemps and became first a reporter for an African-American-owned newspaper and then a columnist.He also started his first magazine, Outlet which was intended to be a West Coast equivalent to The Crsis.In 1925 he moved to Harlem in less than 10 years,he obtained various employment as a ghostwriter,a publisher,and an editor,and a writer of novels,plays,and articles.The following year he became the editor of The Messenger, a socialist journal aimed at blacks.While at The Messenger,Wallace became the first to publish the adult-themed stories of Langston Hughes.He left the journal in October 1926 to become the editor of a white-owned magazine called World Tomorrow.The following month he collaborated in publishing the literary magazine Fire! Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists,among whose contributors were Langston Zora Neale Hurtson,Richard Bruce Nugent,Aaron Douglas,and Gwendolyn B. Bennett.Only one issue of Fire!! was ever published.Fire!! challenged the ideas of W.E.B. Du Bois and many of the African American bourgeoisie,who in their search for social equality and racial integration,believed that black art should serve as propaganda for those end.The New Negro movement needed to show white Americans that black were not inferior.Wallace and  of the" Niggerati"(the deliberately ironic name used for the young African American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance) wanted to show the real lives of African Americans,both the good and the bad.Wallace believed that black artists should be more objective in their writings and not so self-conscious that they failed to acknowledge and celebrate the arduous conditions of African Americans lives.As Singh and Scott put it,Wallace Harlem Renaissance is,staunch and revolutionary in its commitment to individuality and critical objectivity:the black writer need not pander to the aesthetic of the black middle class,nor should he she write for an easy and patronizing white approval.During this time,Wallace rooming house apartment at 267 West 136th Street in Harlem became the main place where the African-American literary avant-grade and visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance met and socialized.He and Zora mockingly called the room "Niggerati Manor" ,in referance to all of the black literati who showed up there.The walls of Niggerati Manor were painted red and black,colors to be emulated on the cover of Fire!! Richard Bruce Nugent painted murals on the walls,some of which contained homoerotic content.In 1928,he published another magazine called Harlem:a Forum of Negro Life,whose contributors included Alain Locke,George Schuyler,and Alice Dunbar Nelson.The publication lasted for only two issues.Afterwards,Wallace became a reader for a major New York publishing company,the first African American  ever in such a position.He married Louise Thompson Patterson on August 22,1928. The marriage lasted only six months.Louise said that wallace was a homosexual and their union was incompatible.Wallace died at the age of 32 from tuberculosis,which many suspect was exacerbated by his long fight with alcoholism.