ABSTRACT
When I began this project, it was with the intention of relinking artifi-cially discrete black and white modernisms. Working under the assumption that the American literary canon reflects the often reactionary efforts of its first scholars to preserve and enshrine an extremely narrow set of experiences (that is, primarily white and male) as the proper terrain of modernism, I set out to find and analyze the connections among black and white writers that had been buried by decades of exclusionary critical practice. I worked with the premise that black and white writers in the first decades of this century had roles to play in each others’ writing. Because my focus was on New York City, and especially Manhattan, I thought my task should not be that difficult. After all, how separate could such phenomena as the Harlem Renaissance, the Lost Generation, High Modernism, and Greenwich Village Bohemianism be when they were all happening at the same time and on the same island?
