James Weldon Johnson's emotionally gripping novel is a landmark in black literary history and, more than eighty years after its original anonymous publication, a classic of American fiction.
Langston Hughes described the experience of the Harlem Renaissance as "…to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame." It was a movement of the senses, steps quickened to the sound of Jazz and Blues, the air was redolent of food reminiscent of Carolina and the Caribbean, the mind was stimulated by new ideas, and the energy was like an electric current to a wire.