or New Negro Movement
Period of outstanding vigour and creativity centred in New York's black ghetto of Harlem in the 1920s.
Its leading literary figures included Alain Locke (1886–1954), James Weldon Johnson , Claude McKay , Countee Cullen , Langston Hughes , Zora Neale Hurston , Jessie Redmon Fauset , Jean Toomer , Wallace Thurman (1902–34), and Arna Bontemps . The literary movement, which coincided with the great creative and commercial growth of jazz and a concurrent growth of the visual arts (see Aaron Douglas ), altered the character of much African American literature. Dialect works and conventional imitations of white writers were replaced with sophisticated explorations of black life and culture.