Wallace Henry Thurman was in the early 1930s acknowledged as one of the leading novelists, poets, critics, and playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance. Yet, he questioned the very existence of the movement. He had arrived in New York in 1925 during the second phase of the Harlem Renaissance, then noted as the most influential movement in African-American literary works and creative culture.While there, he did not only help launch two periodicals dedicated to Black artists but also wrote several plays and three novels, with The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life becoming his most well-known novel. Indeed, the novel’s line “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice” has been referenced in the works of prominent artistes including Kendrick Lamar and Tupac Shakur.
That novel was his first. Thurman centered it on intraracial prejudice, colorism and internalized racism in African-American life. He dedicated it to his maternal grandmother, Emma Jackson, who had helped raise him.
