Fire!! a Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists
WALLACE THURMAN, a native of Salt Lake City, was the author of two important Harlem Renaissance novels, THE BLACKER THE BERRY and INFANTS OF THE SPRING. The first of these describes the travails of a dark-skinned woman trying to make her way in the color-conscious world of the black bourgeoisie. It was among the earliest books to explore in depth the self-hatred generated within the Black community by the internalization of white standards of physical beauty. INFANTS OF THE SPRING is a roman a clef featuring as characters Thurman himself, Richard Bruce Nugent, and the other members of the niggerattithe younger group of writers and artists which created FIRE!!. An important critic, and one of the first black editors to be employed by a white publishing house, Thurman also co-authored HARLEM, a popular Broadway play based on Cordelia the Crude, a story which appeared in FIRE!!. Thurman died of tuberculosis aggravated by alcoholism in 1934 at the age of 32.