Portrait of Wallace Thurman

Wallace Thurman arrived in New York on Labor Day in 1925 during the peak of the Harlem Renaissance. In less than a decade—nine years later—he died of consumption on Welfare Island in the charity ward of City Hospital. Before his death at the young age of thirty-two, Thurman became one of the central personalities of the Renaissance. Among his friends he was known as a bon vivant and bohemian.¹ It was perhaps his “erotic, bohemian” life-style, as Thurman himself described it, as much as his literary creations that made him one of the most fascinating and seductive of the Renaissance figures. During his last years, which he spent in New York, Thurman achieved his greatest successes and perhaps suffered his greatest disappointments. In many ways the course of his life parallels the brief, but colorful and intensely creative, period of the Renaissance itself. As Arna Bontemps described him, “he was like a flame which burned so intensely, it could not last for long, but quickly consumed itself.” Indeed, his mind was ever alert and active, his life constantly hectic and searching. It was Thurman’s way to plunge himself completely into whatever he became interested in. Writing to a friend, he once said, “I have always gone in for things until I exhausted myself then dropped them.”² But for a brief period, no personality among the “New Negroes” shone so brilliantly as that of Wallace Thurman, who found himself on a floodtide of success with the publication of his first novel in 1929, and his well-known play, Harlem, later that same year. Although he published two novels afterward, Thurman’s life, like the flow of the Renaissance, had already receded into an ebbtide.