| Summary: | Four Novels of the 1930s captures the diversity of genre and tone nourished by the Renaissance. Langston Hughes's Not Without Laqughter (1931)---the poet's only novel, an elegiac, elegantly realized coming-of-age tale suffused with childhood memories of Missouri and Kansas---follows a young man from his rural origins to the big city. George S. Schuyler's Black No More (1931), a satire founded on the science-fiction premise of a wonder drug permitting blacks to change their race, savagely caricatures public figures white and black alike in its raucous, carnivalesque send-up of American racial attitudes. Considered the first detective story by an African American writer, Rudolph Fisher's The Conjur-Man Dies (1932) is a mystery that comically mixes and reverses stereotypes, placing a Harvard-educated African "conjure-man" at the center of a phantasmagoric charade of deaths and disappearances. Black Thunder (1936), Arna Bontemps's stirring fictional recreation of Gabriel Prosser's 1800 slave revolt, which, though unsuccessful, shook Jefferson's Virginia to its core, marks a turn from aestheticism toward political militance in its exploration of African American history.
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