Wallace Thurman

A first edition copy of Wallace Thurman's Harlem Renaissance work The Blacker the Berry.

• Wallace Thurman (American).
• The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life.
• New York: The Macaulay Company, 1929. 
• 262 pages.
• Bound in the original brown cloth binding with black lettering and design by Aaron Douglas, top edge stained brown, fore-edge machine deckle.

Wallace Thurman, the "young turk of the Harlem Renaissance," stormed the literary world with his first novel, The Blacker the Berry (Scott). Daniel M. Scott notes the "autobiographical parallels" between Thurman and his protagonist Emma Lou, both of whom faced colorism; Paul Finkelman further describes Thurman's attention to the taboo topic of intraracial color prejudice as one of the many "conscious transgressions" that "marked the content of Thurman's literary endeavors." Thurman, who was bisexual, also explores "Harlem's sexual and moral ambiguity" in The Blacker the Berry, "questioning the parameters by which most Americans conceptualize and/or discuss race and its relationship to gender" by including various hetero- and homosexual encounters in Emma Lou's search for "compatibility between her mask and her life" (Scott).

The binding of this title features a vignette of a female figure designed by Aaron Douglas, a pioneer of the African-American modernist movement and "an integral part of the artistic culture of New York"; he blended Art Deco and Cubist forms with the geometric shapes of African art to create stylish designs for magazines and books (Pritchett).