Infants of the Spring

In this rambunctious satire, Wallace Thurman, one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance, takes his fellow artists and critics to task. The setting is a buzzing apartment building in 1930s Harlem, where avatars for the likes of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, and Thurman himself come together to push past old boundaries and test out new ideas. But the heat of this collective energy soon threatens to consume them all, as wild parties, jealous rages, and intellectual conflicts turn the literary circle into an out-of-control hothouse of personal drama. Based on the author's own experiences, Infants of the Spring overflows with the theories and ideas of the Harlem Renaissance (to say nothing of criticisms and judgments that Thurman may have had about them). Perhaps because of that direct connection to this uniquely generative cultural moment, the book remains a vital novel about sex, race, gender, radical fervor, and artistic ambition.