[In the following essay, Gates details the collaboration of Langston Hughes and Hurston on the play Mule Bone, and describes the plot and historical influence of the drama.]

This play was never done because the authors fell out.

—Langston Hughes, 1931

And fall out, unfortunately, they did, thereby creating the most notorious literary quarrel in African-American cultural history, and one of the most thoroughly documented collaborations in black American literature. Langston Hughes published an account entitled “Literary Quarrel” as the penultimate chapter—indeed, almost as a coda or an afterthought—in his autobiography, The Big Sea (1940). Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston's biographer, published a chapter in his biography entitled “Mule Bone,” and Arnold Rampersad, Hughes's biographer, presents an equally detailed account in volume one of his The Life of Langston Hughes. Only Zora Neale Hurston, of the two principals, did not make public her views of the episode. But she did leave several letters (as did Hughes) in which she explains some of her behavior and feelings. In addition, Hurston left the manuscript of the short story, “The Bone of Contention,” upon which the play was based. These documents—letters, the short story, Hughes's account, and two accounts from careful and judicious scholars—as well as a draft of the text of the play, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, comprise the full record of the curious history of this brilliant collaboration between two extraordinarily talented African-American writers. We have assembled this archival and published data here to provide contemporary readers with the fullest possible account of a complex and bizarre incident that will forever remain impossible to understand completely, beclouded in inexplicable motivation.

In a sense, this is a casebook of a crucial—and ugly—chapter in the history of the Harlem Renaissance, that extraordinarily rich period in American cultural history that witnessed the birth of jazz, the coming to fruition of the classic blues, and the first systematic attempt to generate an entire literary and cultural movement by black Americans. The Harlem Renaissance, also called “The New Negro Renaissance,” is generally thought to have begun in the early 1920s and ended early on in the Great Depression, about the time when Hughes and Hurston had their dispute. The origins of the Renaissance are, of course, complex and have been written about extensively. It is clear, however, that the production of a rich and various black art, especially the written arts and the theatre, could very well help to reshape the public image of black people within American society and facilitate thereby their long struggle for civil rights, a struggle that commenced almost as soon as the last battle of the Civil War ended. As James Weldon Johnson put it in the “Preface” to his Book of American Negro Poetry (1922):

A people may be great through many means, but there is one by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they produced. The world does not know that a people is great until that people produces great literature and art. No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.

If, then, African-Americans created a recognizable and valued canon of literature, its effect would have enormous political ramifications: “The status of the Negro in the United States,” Johnson concluded, “is more a question of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions. And nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.”

Johnson, by 1922 one of the venerable figures of the black literary and theatrical traditions, effectively issued a call to arms for the creation of a literary movement. Soon, political organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League, through their magazines, The Crisis and Opportunity, began to sponsor literary competitions, judged by prominent members of the American literati, with the winners receiving cash prizes, publication in the journals, and often book contracts. At the prompting of Charles Johnson, the editor of Opportunity, Hurston submitted two short stories—“Spunk” and “Black Death”—and two plays—Color Struck and Spears—for consideration in Opportunity's annual literary contests in 1925 and 1926. While “Spunk” and Color Struck won second-place prizes, Spears and “Black Death” won honorable mention. Two other short stories, “Drenched in Light” and “Muttsy” would be published in Opportunity, along with “Spunk.” It was at the 1925 annual awards dinner that she met another award winner, Langston Hughes, who took third prize jointly with Countee Cullen and first prize for his great poem, “The Weary Blues.” It was a momentous occasion, attended by “the greatest gathering of black and white literati ever assembled in one room,” as Arnold Rampersad notes, and included among its judges Eugene O'Neill, John Farrar, Witter Bynner, Alexander Woolcott, and Robert Benchley. Hughes was quite taken with Hurston, Rampersad tells us: She “‘is a clever girl, isn't she?’ he soon wrote to a friend; ‘I would like to know her.’” Eventually, he would know her all too well.

II

Between 1925 and their collaboration on the writing of Mule Bone between March and June 1930, Hughes and Hurston came to know each other well. As Rampersad reports, by mid-summer of 1926, the two were planning a black jazz and blues opera. Hemenway calls it “an opera that would be the first authentic rendering of black folklife, presenting folk songs, dances, and tales that Hurston would collect.” By the end of that summer, the two (along with Wallace Thurman, John P. Davis, Gwen Bennett, Bruce Nugent, and Aaron Douglass, all members of what was jokingly called “The Niggerati”) decided to found a magazine, called Fire!!, the title taken from a Hughes poem. The following year, in July 1927, Hughes and Hurston met quite by accident in Mobile, Alabama, and decided to drive together to Manhattan in her car, “Sassy Susie.” “I knew it would be fun travelling with her,” Rampersad reports Hughes writing. “It was.” The trip lasted about a month, with the two sharing notes on hoodoo, folktales, and the blues along the way, and even meeting Bessie Smith, the great classic blues singer. Shortly after this trip, Hughes introduced Hurston to his patron, Charlotte van der Veer Quick Mason, who would contribute about $75,000 to Harlem Renaissance writers, including $15,000 to Hurston. While Hughes received $150 per month, Hurston received $200. Ironically, their subsidies would end just about the time of their feud over Mule Bone; although Hurston's contract ended March 30, 1931, she received “irregular” payments until September 1932; Hughes and she fell out late in 1930, just before his confrontation with Hurston in Cleveland.

A more natural combination for a collaboration among the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, one can scarcely imagine—especially in the theatre! Hurston wrote to Hughes often during the early period of her research in the South, collecting black folklore as part of her doctoral research in anthropology at Columbia under Franz Boas; Hemenway describes her correspondence as “frequent and conspiratorial,” providing “an unintentional documentary of the expedition.” In April 1928, she shared with Hughes her plans for a culturally authentic African-American theatre, one constructed upon a foundation of the black vernacular: “Did I tell you before I left about the new, the real Negro theatre I plan? Well, I shall, or rather we shall act out the folk tales, however short, with the abrupt angularity and naivete of the primitive 'bama Nigger. Quote that with native settings. What do you think?” They would share the burdens and the glory: “Of course, you know I didn't dream of that theatre as a one man stunt. I had you helping 50-50 from the start. In fact, I am perfectly willing to be 40 to your 60 since you are always so much more practical than I. But I know it is going to be glorious! A really new departure in the drama.” Despite their enthusiasm for this idea, however, Mrs. Mason (“Godmother”) disapproved; as Hurston wrote to Alain Locke, the veritable dean of the Harlem Renaissance and another beneficiary of Mrs. Mason's patronage: “Godmother was very anxious that I should say to you that the plans—rather the hazy dreams of the theatre I talked to you about should never be mentioned again. She trusts her three children [Hurston, Hughes, and Locke] to never let those words pass their lips again until the gods decree that they shall materialize.”

Not only did the two share the dream of a vernacular theatre and opera, but both had established themselves as creative writers and critics by underscoring the value of black folk culture, both of itself and as the basis for formal artistic traditions. By 1930, when, at last, the two would write Mule Bone, Hughes had published two brilliant, widely acclaimed, experimental books of poetry that utilized the blues and jazz as both form and content. And Hurston, though yet to publish a novel, had published sixteen short stories, plays, and essays, in prestigious journals such as Opportunity, Messenger, and the Journal of Negro History, and was pursuing a Ph.D. thesis in anthropology which was to be built around her extensive collection of Afro-American myths. With Hurston's mastery of the vernacular and compelling sense of story, and Hughes's impressive sense of poetic and theatrical structure, it would have been difficult to imagine a more ideal team to construct “a real Negro theatre.” For, at ages twenty-eight and twenty-nine respectively, [Hurston, the scholar Cheryl Wall discovered, shaved ten years from her age. Actually, in 1930, she would have been thirty-nine, not twenty-nine, as she claimed.] Hughes and Hurston bore every promise of reshaping completely the direction of the development of African-American literature away from the blind imitation of American literature and toward a bold and vibrant synthesis of formal American literature and African-American vernacular.

III

The enormous potential of this collaborative effort was never realized, we know, because, as Hughes wrote on his manuscript copy of the text, “the authors fell out.” Exactly why they “fell out” is not completely clear, despite the valiant attempts of Hemenway and Rampersad to reconstruct the curious series of events that led to such disastrous consequences. While we do know that Hughes and Hurston wrote acts one and three together, and, as Hemenway reports, “at least one scene of the second act,” it is impossible to ascertain who wrote what. Hurston had conceived the plot, based as it was on her short story, “The Bone of Contention” (published here for the first time). Hughes would write that he “plotted out and typed the play based on her story,” and that Hurston “authenticated and flavored the dialogue and added highly humorous details.” Rampersad's estimate is probably the most accurate: “Hurston's contribution was almost certainly the greater to a play set in an all-black town in the backwoods South (she drew here on her childhood memories), with an abundance of tall tales, wicked quips, and farcical styles of which she was absolute master and Langston not much more than a sometimes student. … Whatever dramatic distinction the play would have, Hurston certainly brought to it.” But, just as surely, it was Hughes who shaped the material into a play, into comic drama, with a plot, a dramatic structure, and a beginning, middle, and end. While Hurston had published a play, and Hughes had not yet completed his first play, Hughes was the superior dramatist. Neither, however, would ever achieve the results that they did, in close collaboration, with Mule Bone.

While we cannot explain Hurston's motivation for denying Hughes's collaboration, which caused the dispute and the ending of their friendship, we can re-create the strange series of events through the following chronology, which is based on the accounts of Hemenway and Rampersad, printed in this book:

This, in barest outline, is an account of the bizarre events of an extremely ugly affair. As Hemenway and Rampersad make clear, Hurston justified her denial of Hughes's collaboration by claiming anger over Hughes's apparent proposal that Louise Thompson be given a share of all royalties, and that she be made the business manager of any Broadway production that might evolve. In Hurston's words:

In the beginning, Langston, I was very eager to do the play with you. ANYthing you said would go over big with me. But scarcely had we gotten underway before you made three propositions that shook me to the foundation of myself. First: that three way split with Louise. Now Langston, nobody has in the history of the world given a typist an interest in a work for typing it. Nobody would think of it unless they were prejudiced in favor of the typist.

If this seems scant reason, sixty years later, for Hurston's protest over Thompson's financial role to assume such an extreme form, her behavior was no doubt also motivated, as Hemenway and Rampersad argue, by Hughes's deteriorating relationship with Mrs. Mason and Hurston's desire to continue hers, even if at Hughes's expense. Hurston kept Mrs. Mason abreast of these developments over the play, and even sent her copies of Hughes's letters to her, all the while denying his claims to Mason. What seems clear, however, is that Hurston's behavior was not justified by her anger over Hughes's friendship with Thompson, and that her claim of sole authorship should not have been made. As Hughes concluded, “our art was broken,” as was both their friendship and the promise of a new and bold direction in black theatre.

IV

Certainly one tragic aspect of the failure of Hughes and Hurston to produce and publish Mule Bone was the interruption of the impact that it might have had on the shape and direction of Afro-American theatre. Among all of the black arts, greater expectations were held for none more than for black theatre. As early as 1918, W. E. B. Du Bois, writing in The Crisis, argued that “the value of [a sustained Afro-American theatre] for Negro art can scarcely be overestimated.” In 1925, Du Bois would help to found Krigwa, a black theatre group in Harlem, dedicated to drama that is “by,” “for,” “about,” and “near us,” a self-contained and self-sustaining Afro-American theatre. Du Bois was just one of many critics who felt that the drama was the most crucial form of all of the arts for the future of black artistic development, and that it was precisely in this area that blacks had most signally failed. As Alain Locke put it, “Despite the fact that Negro life is somehow felt to be particularly rich in dramatic values, both as folk experience and as a folk temperament, its actual yield, so far as worthwhile drama goes, has been very inconsiderable.” And, in another essay published in 1927, Locke wrote:

In the appraisal of the possible contribution of the Negro to the American theatre, there are those who find the greatest promise in the rising drama of Negro life. Others see possibilities of a deeper, though subtler influence upon what is after all more vital, the technical aspects of the arts of the theatre. Until very recently the Negro influence upon American drama has been negligible, whereas even under the handicaps of second-hand exploitation and restriction to the popular amusement stage, the Negro actor has already considerably influenced our stage and its arts. One would do well to imagine what might happen if the art of the Negro actor should really become artistically lifted and liberated. Transpose the possible resources of Negro song and dance and pantomime to the serious stage, envisage an American drama under the galvanizing stimulus of a rich transfusion of essential folk-arts and you may anticipate what I mean. (“The Negro and the American Theatre”)

There can be little doubt that Locke here voices the theory of black drama that Hurston and Hughes sought to embody in their unwritten black opera and in Mule Bone. (Hurston had, by the way, once described the relationship among the three as that of a triangle, with Hughes and her forming the base, and Locke the apex.)

There are many reasons for the supposed primacy of the theatre among the arts of the Harlem Renaissance. Many scholars date the commencement of the Renaissance itself to the phenomenal and unprecedented success of Eubie Blake's and Noble Sissle's all-black Broadway musical, Shuffle Along, which opened in 1921. (Blake and Sissle did the score, and Aubrey Lyles and Flournoy Miller did the book.) As Bruce Kellner informs us, “Often the week's first run business was so heavy that the street on which it was playing had to be designated for one-way traffic only.” Josephine Baker, Florence Mills, and Paul Robeson were just a few of the performers who played in this musical.

Predictably, the success of Shuffle Along spawned a whole host of imitators, including Alabama Bound, Bandana Land, Black Bottom Revue, Black Scandals, Blackbirds, Chocolate Blondes, Chocolate Browns, Chocolate Dandies, Darktown Scandals, Darktown Strutters, Goin' White, Lucky Sambo, North Ain't South, Raisin' Cane, Strut Miss Lizzie, Seven-Eleven, Dixie to Broadway, and Runnin' Wild (which introduced “The Charleston”), to list just a few. Jazz, the dance, acting, and an extraordinarily large white and sympathetic audience made the theatre an enormously promising venue for a black art that would transform the public image of the Negro. Its effect was both broad and immediate; there was not the sort of mediation necessary between artist and audience as is the case with a printed book. What's more, theatre as a combination of several arts—poetry, narrative, music, the dance, acting, the visual arts—allowed blacks to bring together the full range of their traditions, vernacular and formal, rather than just one. The great potential of the theatre was hard to resist.

Resistance, however, arose from tradition itself. The roots of black theatre in the twenties were buried in the soil of minstrelsy and vaudeville. Musicals such as Shuffle Along did indeed reach tens of thousands more Americans than would any book before Native Son (1940). But what image did they represent, and at what cost? Reviews of Shuffle Along often turned on phrases such as “extreme energy,” “the sun of their good humor.” Especially notable were the dancers' “jiggling,” “prancing,” “wiggling,” and “cavorting.” In other words, what this sort of black theatre did was to reinforce the stereotype of black people as happy-go-lucky, overly sensual bodies. And while it was (and remains) difficult to disrupt the integrity of jazz and Afro-American dance, even in association with quasi-minstrel forms, it is difficult to imagine how the intelligence of these artistic traditions could shine through the raucous humor of this kind of theatre. Broadway, in other words, stood as the counterpoint to the sort of written art that Hughes and Hurston were determined to create, even if they envied Broadway's potential and actual market. Accordingly, they decided to intervene, to do for the drama what Hughes had done for poetry and what Hurston would do (in Jonah's Gourd Vine [1934] and Their Eyes Were Watching God [1937]) for the novel, which was to shape a formal written art out of the vast and untapped black vernacular tradition.

Mule Bone was based on a Hurston short story, “The Bone of Contention,” which Hurston never published. For the Hurston scholar, it is particularly fascinating as a glimpse into Hurston's manner of revising or transforming the oral tradition (she had collected the story in her folklore research) and because of its representation of various characters (such as Eatonville, an all-black town where Hurston was born, Joe Clarke and his store, the yellow mule and his mock burial) who would recur in subsequent works, such as Mule Bone and Their Eyes Were Watching God.

The story's plot unfolds as follows: Dave Carter and Jim Weston are hunting turkeys one evening. Carter claims to have shot a turkey, while Weston is loading his gun. Weston claims that it is his shot that killed the turkey. They struggle. Jim Weston strikes Dave Carter on the head with “de hockbone” of a mule, Carter alleges, and steals his turkey.

The remainder of the plot depicts the trial, held at the Baptist Church and presided over by Mayor Joe Clarke. Weston is a Methodist while Clarke is a Baptist, and the townspeople are equally divided between the two denominations. They are also fiercely competitive, bringing a religious significance to the quarrel. In fact, Carter and Weston would be represented in court by their ministers, Rev. Simms (Methodist) and Elder Long (Baptist). “The respective congregations were lined up behind their leaders,” the text tells us.

The resolution of the dilemma turns on traditional African-American biblical exegesis: can a mule-bone be a weapon? If it can, then it follows that its use could constitute a criminal act. Using Judges 15:16, Elder Long proves that since a donkey is the father of a mule, and since Samson slew one thousand Philistines with the jaw-bone of an ass, and since “de further back on a mule you goes, do mo' dangerous he gits,” then “by de time you gits clear back tuh his hocks hes rank pizen.” Jim Weston is banished from town.

The plot of Mule Bone is very similar. The play consists of three acts, and includes Jim Weston and Dave Carter (best friends), Joe Clarke, but now Daisy Taylor, over whom Weston and Clarke will, inevitably, quarrel. Weston will strike Carter with the hock-bone of “Brazzle's ole yaller mule,” during an argument over Daisy on the front porch of Clarke's store. Weston is arrested, Carter is rushed off to be treated, leaving Daisy alone wondering who's going to walk her home.

Act Two consists of two scenes. The first reveals the subtext of the trial—the struggle between Joe Clarke and Elder Simms for mayor, and the class tension between the Baptists and the Methodists. Scene Two occurs mostly in the Macedonia Baptist Church, newly transformed into a courthouse, with Joe Clarke presiding. As in the short story, the Methodists and Baptists seat themselves on opposite sides, even singing competing hymns (Baptists, “Onward Christian Soldiers” and the Methodists, “All Hail the Power of Jesus's Name”) when the mayor asks that the proceedings commence with a hymn. Act Two proceeds as does the short story, with Judges 18:18 coming to bear in exactly the same manner as had Judges 15:16. Jim Weston, found guilty, is banished from town for two years.

Act Three depicts the reconciliation of Jim and Dave, and Jim's return to Eatonville, following their joint rejection of Daisy, who as it turns out, wants her husband to “work for her white folks.” What is most interesting about this scene is that the tension between Dave and Jim is resolved in a witty and sustained verbal dual, in which the two trade cleverly improvised hyperbolic claims of their love for Daisy, in an elaborate ritual of courtship. As Hemenway puts it:

When Dave asks Jim how much time he would do for Daisy on the chain gang, Jim answers, “Twenty years and like it.” Dave exults, “See dat, Daisy, Dat nigger ain't willin to do no time for you. I'd beg de judge to gimme life.”

Again a significant stage direction interrupts the dialogue. By telling us that “both Jim and Dave laugh,” Hurston and Hughes were trying to show the sense of verbal play and rhetorical improvisation characteristic of Eatonville generally, and Joe Clark's store-front porch specifically. … The contest is a ritual, designed to defuse the violence implicit in the conflict, to channel the aggression into mental rather than physical terms. The manner in which the courting contest ends suggests its ritualistic nature: Dave says to Daisy, “Don't you be skeered, baby. Papa kin take keer o you [To Jim: suiting the action to the word] Countin from de finger back to de thumb. … Start anything, I got you some.” Jim is taken aback: “Aw, I don't want no more fight wid you, Dave.” Dave replies, “Who said anything about fighting? We just provin who love Daisy de best.”

This courtship ritual, like so much of the verbal “signifying” rituals in which the characters engage throughout the play, are both reflections of historical folk rituals practiced by African Americans as well as their extensions or elaborations. As Hemenway shows so carefully in his essay appended to this volume, often the characters' dialogues are taken directly from the black vernacular tradition. As often, however, Hughes and Hurston are imitating that tradition, improvising upon a historical foundation of ritualized oral discourse, which Hurston had been collecting as part of her graduate research in anthropology with Franz Boas. Hughes and Hurston, in other words, were drawing upon the black vernacular tradition both to “ground” their drama in that discourse but also to “extend” the vernacular itself.

Mule Bone, then, was not a mere vehicle for black folklore, rather, black folklore, served as the basis, the foundation, for what they hoped would be a truly new art form: an art form that would stand in relation to traditional American drama in the way that Hughes's “blues poetry” stood to American poetry and Hurston's vernacular fictions stood to the American novel. Mule Bone, in other words, was meant to be the dramatic embodiment of James Weldon Johnson's demand that “the colored poet in the United States needs to do … something like what Synge did for the Irish; he needs to find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without, such as the mere mutilation of English spelling and pronunciation. He needs a form that is freer and larger than dialect, but which will still hold the racial flavor; a form expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought, and the distinctive humor and pathos, too, of the Negro, but which will also be capable of voicing the deepest and highest emotions and aspirations, and allow of the widest range of subjects and the widest scope of treatment.” Dialect, Johnson continued, was doomed by its racist textual heritage:

Negro dialect is at present a medium that is not capable of giving expression to the varied conditions of Negro life in America, and much less is it capable of giving the fullest interpretation of Negro character and psychology. This is no indictment against the dialect as dialect, but against the mould of convention in which Negro dialect in the United States has been set.

Mule Bone was also a refutation of Johnson's claim that “Negro dialect” “is an instrument with but two full stops, humor and pathos,” because of the racist minstrel and vaudeville representations of black characters and their language. This is what they meant when they subtitled their play “A Comedy of Negro Life” and when they claimed that Mule Bone was “the first real Negro folk comedy.”

By using the vernacular tradition as the foundation for their drama—indeed, as the basis for a new theory of black drama—Hughes and Hurston succeeded quite impressively in creating a play that implicitly critiqued and explicitly reversed the racist stereotypes of the ignorant dialect-speaking darky that had populated the stages of the minstrel and vaudeville traditions. Indeed, we can only wonder at the effect that a successful Broadway production of Mule Bone might have had on the subsequent development of black theatre, given the play's sheer novelty and freshness of language.

With their turn to the vernacular, however, Hurston and Hughes also seem at times to reinscribe the explicit sexism of that tradition, through the discussions of physical abuse and wife-beatings as agents of control, which the male characters on Joe Clarke's store-front porch seem to take for granted as a “natural” part of sexual relations. These exchanges are quite disturbing for our generation of readers, demanding as they do a forceful critique by the reader. Daisy's representation in a triangle of desire as the object of her lovers' verbal dueling rather than as one who duels herself, a mode of dueling that demands great intelligence, is also a concern, even if this concern is tempered somewhat by the fact that it is she who controls their complex relationship all along, as demonstrated when she dismisses them both when they will not accede to her demands that they get jobs and provide support for her own efforts at self-sufficiency: “Both of you niggers can git yo' hat on yo' heads and git on down de road. Neither one of y'all don't have to have me. I got a good job and plenty men beggin' for yo' change.” Despite this, however, the depiction of female characters and sexual relations in Mule Bone almost never escapes the limitation of the social realities that the vernacular tradition reflects.

Mule Bone was never completed. Hurston, in a frantic attempt to demonstrate to Hughes's lawyer, Arthur Spingarn, that she had indeed been the play's sole author, sent him more handwritten revisions of large sections of the play, creating still another version. We have reprinted here, however, the last version on which Hughes and Hurston collaborated. Despite its limitations as a work-in-progress, it stands as a daring attempt to resurrect black poetic language from the burial grounds of racist stereotypes. Had it been performed, the power of its poetic language could very well have altered forever the evolution of African-American drama enabling the theatre to fulfill its great—and still unfulfilled—potential among the African-American arts.

Selected Bibliography

Baker, Houston A., Jr. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Du Bois, W. E. B. “Can the Negro Save the Drama?” Theatre Magazine XXXVIII (July 1923): 12, 68.

Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre.” Amsterdam News (October 5, 1927) and Crisis XXXII, No. 3 (July 1926): 134-36.

Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Negro and the American Stage.” Crisis XXVIII, No. 2 (June 1924): 55-60.

Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Negro Theatre.” Crisis XV (February 1918): 165.

Fabre, Geneviève. Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphors: Contemporary Afro-American Theatre. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinios, 1977.

Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Johnson, James Weldon. “Preface.” In The Book of American Negro Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1931.

Kellner, Bruce. The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary of the Era. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.

Locke, Alain. “The Drama of Negro Life.” Theatre Arts Monthly 10 (October 1926): 701-06.

Locke, Alain. “The Negro and the American Stage.” Theatre Arts Monthly 10 (February 1926): 112-20.

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. Vol. 1: 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.