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FALL 2013 UHQ pp 304-385_UHQ Stories/pp.4-68 9/16/13 1:25 PM Page 354 UTAh hISTOrICAL QUArTErLy new cultural ebullience as a rebirth and an awakening—the Harlem Renaissance. On the other hand, artists, bearers of culture, and leaders like Garvey valorized a black aesthetics grounded in black oral and folk culture, specifically music: blues and jazz and art. As Hughes, considered the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance, stated in his now-classic essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” “perhaps these common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself.”43 This battle raged at the core of the general explosion of creative activity in post–World War I America. Significantly, this movement also included many white intellectuals such as Carl Van Vechten, a contributor to Vanity Fair, and others who hoped to forget the sterility of their own lives by frequenting nightclubs that offered jazz and alcohol, where black performers danced against a backdrop of cardboard jungles. Black literati suddenly enjoyed a prestige among whites that they had not known before.Young blacks and white moderns joined in a dazzling outpouring of creativity, the whole movement anchored by a group of well-respected and well-organized older black men, including DuBois, McKay, Locke, Walter White, and George Schuyler.44 The younger, more radical generation was represented by such writers as Countee Cullen, Zora Neal Hurston, Rudolph “Bud” Fisher, Hughes, Nugent, Jean Toomer, and Thurman, who stood with the vanguard of this pioneering black cultural movement.45 Pulled by reports of the Harlem Renaissance and pushed by his lack of success in Los Angeles, Thurman followed his fellow journalist-novelist Arna Bontemps to New York City, arriving in Harlem on September 7, 1925. For the next three months he remained unemployed, although, according to Dorothy West, this “did not matter, for that was the great ‘sponge era’ too, and you ate at anyone’s mealtime. . . . Downtown whites were more than generous. You opened your hand and it closed over a five spot.”46 One could also hold a “Rent Party,” in which “you invited a crowd of people to your studio charging them admission, got your bootlegger to trust you for a gallon or two of gin, sold it at fifteen cents a paper cup, and earned enough from the evening’s proceeding to pay for your back rent, your bootlegger, and still had sufficient money left to lay a week’s supply of liquor and some crackers and sardines.”47 Judging by his account of a “Rent Party,” which he described as a “Harlem Institution” in a 1927 article in the World Tomorrow, Thurman was no stranger to such events: 43 Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry L. Gates Jr., 2nd edition (New York: Norton, 2004), 1311–14. 44 West, “Elephant’s Dance,” 78. 45 Ibid., 79. 46 Ibid., 78. 47 Ibid.; Watson, Harlem Renaissance, 130–31, provides detailed information about the “Rent Party.” Some people made their livelihood holding such parties. 354