Women of the Harlem Renaissance Book

Wall's work - part history/part critical analysis/part biography - is a fantastic introduction to lesser-heard voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Her chapters are filled with lots of biographical and historical information and are very readable and interesting, as she honors women whose names are often not as well-recognized as some of the male writers of the time, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. She also notes that since other collections examining the period limit the authors considered due to when their works were published, many great women writers have been wrongfully excluded (10). Many of the women writers she writes about, including Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennett, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Anne Spencer, died without their written works being tied to their names and after having deserted writing to take up careers as mothers, nurses or teachers instead. She ends stating: "But if these literary foremothers were sometimes unable to live their dreams and convictions, they left a legacy in their art. Their literary legatees critique, revise, and extend the themes, forms, and metaphors that they employed in their poetry and fiction [...] The lives and work of the women of the Harlem Renaissance constitute a chapter in a literary history that is in the process of being written and made" (204).