Wallace Thurman Research Paper

Wallace Thurman, an author during the Harlem Renaissance, was very strong in life and affected many people. Starting in the 1920s was the rebirth of African American culture, known as the Harlem Renaissance. Between World War 1 and the Great Depression, jobs in the north were opening 750,00 African Americans left the South and transferred to the urban areas in the North. The Harlem section of Manhattan, was the largest concentration of black people in the world, which held 175,000 African Americans.The whites in the North complained that African Americans were taking over the employment market and lowering wages.Writers, actors, artists, and musicians spoken highly of African American traditions, and at the same time created new ones for

If they did not want to take part in the racial typecast, they did musical comedies. The artists of the Harlem Renaissance impacted on all American culture. For some reason, White Americans could not look away. The Harlem Renaissance art often used bold colors arranged in a new type of fashion. Many of these pieces showed African Americans as educated, dancing, making music, dining or doing other activities.These pictures of African Americans enjoying culture was partly an attempt to break down stereotypes of African Americans as unsophisticated and stupid. The writers of the Harlem Renaissance expressed their pride in being black and encouraged other African Americans to love their culture through literature and art. They showed a better understanding of what it meant to be black. Wallace Thurman was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on August 16, 1902. A little after his birth, his father, Oscar Thurman, left him and his mother, Beulah Thurman. His mother married and divorced six times, which meant Thurman was sent to live with his grandmother, Emma Jackson, who ran an illegal bar out of

He attended the University of Utah for a year then went to the University of Southern California, ironically he never completed a degree.Thurman's attention was in the medical field, but he started focusing more and more on writing. While staying in Los Angeles, he started working as a newspaper reporter and became of a founder of a magazine called Outlet, which many thought was going to be the same as the NAACP publication The Crisis. Outlet, only lasted for six months. In 1925, Thurman moved to Harlem, New York to work as an editor and a writer of many works such as, novels, plays, and journalistic articles. His apartment became a meeting place for African American authors and artists. Thurman called the room “ Niggerati Manor”, he also painted it black and red and also had murals on the walls. In 1926, he became the editor of The Messenger, which was a journal made for African American readers. He left in autumn of 1926 to join a magazine called World Tomorrow, which was