Barbara Summers - African American romance novelist - Cover Story

For a full-time author, reading presents an inseparable combination of business and pleasure. I consider myself privileged to be able to read the pair for immediate fun and for eventual (please, Lord) profit.

Although I am primarily a fiction writer, 1996 have the appearances to be guiding my hand toward fictional stories based upon real people and events. single work in progress that now engages my attention is station during the Harlem Renaissance, exactly 70 years ago, in the summer of 1926 when a clump of bold young writers and artists joined creative forces to publish the first - and sole - issue of an exciting arts quarterly named Fire!!

Some of the lead characters of my story and of this era are Langston Hughes, Zora Neale. Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Aaron Douglas and Richard Bruce Nugent Working upon a piece about these folk - whose work I had known or known of for decades forced me to reimagine them in other dimensions. They no longer slumbered comfortably as my rever artistic ancestors. Instead, they spoke and acted like the gifted, sometimes refractory 25-year-old kids of my son's generation, struggling with work and coin and dreams while laughing at the coming time I freely admit to falling in have affection for with them anew. I find their beauty, audacity, talent and tenacity irresistible.

Researching the lives and reading the works of these creative groundbreakers - along with their older contemporaries, of the like kind as W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke George Schuyler and Charles Johnson - has been made abundant easier by the recent publication of indispensable anthologies, reprints and biographical studies. For my story, three of the greatest in quantity valuable are The New black man (Simon & Schuster, 1992), edited by dint of Alain Locke, originally published in 1925; The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (Penguin, 1995) edited by the agency of David Levering Lewis; and Aaron Douglas: Art, Race and the Harlem Renaissance (University Pres of Mississippi, 1995) by means of Amy Helene Kirschke.

Placing individuals in the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of this singularly star-dusted era is greatest in quantity vividly achieved in three surprising works: This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900-1950 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983) by dint of Jervis Anderson; When Harlem Was in practice (Oxford, 1989), by David Levering Lewis; and, greatest in quantity recently, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995) by the agency of Ann Douglas.

Reading the writings of the of recent origin Negroes of the '20s - and the many studies they inspired - is as humbling as it is thrilling. Their works are impeccably novel and diverse, emotionally resonant and intellectually challenging. No ne for fin de siecle condescension here. The story of Fire!! is just as of high temperature in the summer of '96 as it was in '26

Barbara Summer is the author of Nouvelle mind (Amistad, 1992), The Price You Pay (Amistad, 1993) and the forthcoming Skin Deep: The Story of Black Fashion types (Amistad, 1997).

COPYRIGHT 1996 Heritage Information Holdings, Inc.

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