Blacker the Berry

Mirroring Nella Larsen's Passing, The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life is the fantastic debut of Wallace Thurman.A Black boy could get along but a Black girl would never know anything but sorrow and disappointment.Emma Lou was born black. Abandoned by her father at birth, she is subjected to skin bleaching by her mother, hoping to make her child more desirable. Learning that she is unwanted in white society but also ostracized within her own, Emma Lou navigates a harsh and unrelenting world as she tries to come to terms with her life and love herself in the skin she's in.Professionally typeset with a beautifully designed cover, this edition of The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life is a reimagining of a Harlem Renaissance staple for the modern reader.

WALLACE THURMAN (1902 - 1934) was a Black novelist and figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Salt Lake City, Thurman was a lifelong reader and writer who completed his first novel at ten and read the likes of Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, and Charles Baudeliare. Moving to Harlem at the height of the Renaissance, Thurman had his hand in multiple literary productions such as The Messenger, World Tomorrow, and Fire!!!. A strong critic of the New Negro movement, Thurman found himself a part of the “Niggerati”—a group of Black artists and intellectuals who wanted to use their art to showcase African-American life as it authentically was whether good or bad—firmly against appealing to the Black middle class or the white gaze. Becoming one of the first Black readers at a major New York publishing house and experiencing prejudice on both sides of the color line, he felt moved to write The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life and three years later, Infants of Spring. Said by Langston Hughes to be, "...a strangely brilliant black boy, who had read everything and whose critical mind could find something wrong with everything he read,” Thurman was a complex and important voice in the Harlem Renaissance. WALLACE THURMAN (1902 - 1934) was a Black novelist and figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Salt Lake City, Thurman was a lifelong reader and writer who completed his first novel at ten and read the likes of Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, and Charles Baudeliare. Moving to Harlem at the height of the Renaissance, Thurman had his hand in multiple literary productions such as The Messenger, World Tomorrow, and Fire!!!. A strong critic of the New Negro movement, Thurman found himself a part of the “Niggerati”—a group of Black artists and intellectuals who wanted to use their art to showcase African-American life as it authentically was whether good or bad—firmly against appealing to the Black middle class or the white gaze. Becoming one of the first Black readers at a major New York publishing house and experiencing prejudice on both sides of the color line, he felt moved to write The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life and three years later, Infants of Spring. Said by Langston Hughes to be, "...a strangely brilliant black boy, who had read everything and whose critical mind could find something wrong with everything he read,” Thurman was a complex and important voice in the Harlem Renaissance.