The New Negro: An Interpretation

First edition

The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) is an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays on African and African-American art and literature edited by Alain Locke, who lived in Washington, DC and taught at Howard University during the Harlem Renaissance. As a collection of the creative efforts coming out of the burgeoning New Negro Movement or Harlem Renaissance, the book is considered by literary scholars and critics to be the definitive text of the movement.^[1]

The New Negro is divided into two sections:^[2]

• "The Negro Renaissance" included Locke's title essay "The New Negro," as well as nonfiction essays, poetry, and fiction by writers including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Eric Walrond.
• "The New Negro in a New World" includes social and political analysis by writers including W. E. B. Du Bois, historian E. Franklin Frazier, Melville J. Herskovits, James Weldon Johnson, Paul U. Kellogg, Elise Johnson McDougald, Kelly Miller, Robert R. Moton, and activist Walter Francis White.^[3]

The book contains several portraits by Winold Reiss and illustrations by Aaron Douglas. It was published by Albert and Charles Boni, New York, in 1925.^[4]

See also

• FIRE!!

References

1. Arnold Rampersad, introduction to The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, 1992
2. "The new Negro : an interpretation", WorldCat.
3. Richard A. Long, "New Negro, The", The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Ed. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.
4. Winold Reiss (illustrator) & Aaron Douglas (illustrator) (1925). Alain Locke, ed. The New Negro. New York: Albert and Charles Boni.