Claude McKay reads "If We Must Die"
Considered one of the founding members of "the New Negro movement" which would later become known as the Harlem Renaissance, Claude McKay reads one of his more frequently anthologized works "If We Must Die". This poem was written in response to the Red Summer of 1919, a harrowing time when anti-black riots broke out in approximately 25 cities across the country resulting in unfair, unjust, and untimely deaths.
PODCAST: Contemporary Poets Discuss Mc Kay's "If We Must Die"
Listen to noted scholars, Herman Beavers, Shalamisha Tillet and Kathy Lou Schultz talk about the structure and circumstances under which "If We Must Die" was written.
PoemTalk is a collaboration of the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, and the Poetry Foundation. It is published as a podcast series in Jacket2 and available for subscription and download in iTunes. In your iTunes store searchbox, type “PoemTalk” and you'll easily find us.
Academic Video Online
Literary Research Databases
Use the following databases to locate literary criticism about writers from the Harlem Renaissance.
- Alexander Street Literature
Is a comprehensive, cross-searchable package of collections covering literatures of place, race, and gender. Today, Alexander Street Literature features 13 collections and offers over 600,000 pages of poetry, short fiction, and novels, along with more than 4,000 full-text plays. With new content being added on a regular basis, the current package currently has over 852,000. Includes: Black Short Fiction and Folklore, Black Women Writers, Caribbean Literature, Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, Latin American Women Writers, Latino Literature, Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, and South and Southeast Asian Literature in English.
- Gale Literature
Gale Literature is an integrated research experience that brings together Gale's premier literary databases. This unique digital environment allows researchers of all levels to find a starting point, search across a wide array of materials and points in time, and discover new ways to analyse information. Currently, users can cross-search these collections: Gale Literature Criticism, Gale Literature Resource Center, Gale Literature: LitFinder, Subcollections of Gale eBooks titles, Gale Literature: Dictionary of Literary Biography , Gale Literature: Something About the Author , Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors
- JSTOR
Jstor Is a highly selective digital library of academic content in many formats and disciplines. The collections include top peer-reviewed scholarly journals as well as respected literary journals, academic monographs, research reports from trusted institutes, and primary sources. The library has the entire Arts & Sciences Collection, the Life Sciences Collection and Business Journal IV. We have both archival and current subscriptions.
- Oxford African American Studies Center
The Oxford African American Studies Center combines the authority of carefully edited reference works. It contains: Africana, Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895, Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present,Black Women in America, 2nd Edition, African American National Biography, Dictionary of African Biography, The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought, and the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography.
- ProQuest Black Studies
This database will combine primary and secondary sources, leading historical Black newspapers, archival documents, key government materials, video, writings by major American Black intellectuals and essays by top scholars in Black Studies.
Harlem Renaissance Poetry
Select HARLEM RENAISSANCE as the Literary Period to locate over 1000 poems from this time period.
You can also Search by the poet's name (ex. LANGSTON HUGHES)
You can search by keyword (ex. crystal stair) or Poem Title (ex. Negro Speaks of Rivers)
Literature of the Harlem Renaissance
Documents of the Harlem Renaissance
- Summary: "This book explores the transformative energy and excitement that African Americans expressed in aesthetic and civic currents that percolated the opening of the 20th century and proved a force in the modernization of America."-- Provided by publisher.
A History of the Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. The movement laid the groundwork for subsequent African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. In its attention to a wide range of genres and forms - from the roman à clef and the bildungsroman, to dance and book illustrations - this book seeks to encapsulate and analyze the eclecticism of Harlem Renaissance cultural expression.
The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism
A groundbreaking volume resituating the Harlem Renaissance as integral to the development of twentieth-century modernism Beginning in the 1920s, Upper Manhattan became the center of an explosion of art, writing, and ideas that has since become legendary. But what we now know as the Harlem Renaissance, the first movement of international modern art led by African Americans, extended far beyond New York City.
Langston Hughes in Context
Langston Hughes was among the most influential African American writers of the twentieth century. He inspired and challenged readers from Harlem to the Caribbean, Europe, South America, Asia, the African continent, and beyond. To study Langston Hughes is to develop a new sense of the twentieth century. He was more than a man of his times; emerging as a key member of the Harlem Renaissance, his poems, plays, journalism, translations, and prose fiction documented and shaped the world around him.
Harlem Renaissance Writers
Click on a NAME or IMAGE to find library resources about a writer from this time period.
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