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Wallace Henry Thurman (August 16, 1902 – December 22, 1934) was an American novelist and screenwriter active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his first novel (1929), which explores discrimination based on skin tone within the black community, with lighter skin being more highly valued.
Thurman's early life was marked by loneliness, family instability, and illness. He began grade school at age six in Boise, Idaho, but his poor health eventually led to a two-year absence from school. During this time, he returned to live with his grandmother Emma in Salt Lake City. From 1910 to 1914, Thurman lived in Chicago. Continuing to move with his mother, he finished grammar school in North Omaha.Singh & Scott (2003), p. 3 During this time, he suffered from repeated . While living in Pasadena, California in the winter of 1918, Thurman caught influenza during the worldwide Influenza Pandemic. He recovered and returned to Salt Lake City, where he finished high school.
Thurman was a voracious reader. He enjoyed the works of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire and many others. He wrote his first novel at the age of 10. He attended the University of Utah from 1919 to 1920 as a pre-medical student. In 1922 he transferred to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and took a few journalism courses, but left without earning a degree. He was also a postal clerk for three years.
While in Los Angeles, he met and befriended writer Arna Bontemps, and became a reporter and wrote a column, "Inklings,” for a short-lived black-owned newspaper, The Pacific Defender. He started a magazine, Outlet, intended to be a West Coast equivalent to The Crisis, operated by the NAACP.
Thurman left the journal in November 1926 to become an editor for World Tomorrow, which was owned by whites. The following month, he collaborated in founding the literary magazine Fire!! Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. Among its contributors were Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, Aaron Douglas, and Gwendolyn B. Bennett.
Thurman published only one issue of Fire!!. It challenged such established figures as W. E. B. Du Bois and other African Americans who had been working for social equality and racial integration. Thurman criticized them for believing that black art should serve as propaganda for those ends. He said that the New Negro movement spent too much energy trying to show white Americans that Black Americans were respectable and not inferior. In general, Thurman challenged the ideas of the black bourgeoisie and used Fire!! as a medium to give other younger artists a voice against them. However, Thurman spent the rest of his life repaying debts from the failure of Fire!!, frequently complaining to and borrowing money from Hughes via their letter correspondences.Singh & Scott (2003), p. 112
Thurman and others of the "Niggerati" (the deliberately ironic name he used for the young African American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance) wanted to show the real lives of African Americans, both the good and the bad. Thurman believed that black artists should fully acknowledge and celebrate the arduous conditions of African-American lives. As Singh and Scott wrote,
Thurman's Harlem Renaissance is, thus, staunch and revolutionary in its commitment to individuality and critical objectivity: the black writer need not pander to the aesthetic preferences of the black middle class, nor should he or she write for an easy and patronizing white approval.Singh & Scott (2003), pp. 19–20
During this time, Thurman's flat in a rooming house, at 267 West 136th Street in Harlem, where he lived with fellow writer Richard Bruce Nugent, became the central meeting place of African-American literary avant-garde and visual artists.Aberjhani and West (2003), Encyclopedia, p. 242 Thurman and Hurston mockingly called the room "Niggerati Manor."Rafia Zahar (ed.): Harlem Renaissance, Five Novels of the 1920s, Library of America, 2011. A biographical note on Thurman states (p.851) "... in November 1926 Thurman moved into an apartment at 267 West 136th Street (nicknamed "Niggerati Manor"), which he shared with the artist and writer Richard Bruce Nugent and which became a social center frequented by Hughes, Hurston, Dorothy West, and others." He had painted the walls red and black, which were the colors he used on the cover of Fire!! Bruce Nugent painted on the walls, some of which contained homoerotic content.
In 1928, Thurman was asked to edit a magazine called ; its contributors included Alain Locke, George Schuyler, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. He put out two issues. Afterward, Thurman joined the editorial staff for MacFadden Publishers.
Langston Hughes described Thurman as "a strangely brilliant black boy, who had read everything and whose critical mind could find something wrong with everything he read." Thurman's dark skin color attracted comment, including negative reactions from both black and white Americans. He addressed such colorism in his writings, attacking the black community's preference for its lighter-skinned members.
Thurman wrote a play, , which debuted on Broadway theatre in 1929 to mixed reviews. His theatrical agent was Frieda Fishbein. The same year his first novel (1929) was published. The novel is now recognized as a groundbreaking work of fiction because of its focus on intra-racial prejudice and colorism within the black community, where lighter skin was favored.
Three years later, Thurman published Infants of the Spring (1932), a satire of the themes and individuals of the Harlem Renaissance.
Thurman also co-authored his final novel with another white collaborator Abraham L. Furman in 1932, The Interne, a fictional exposé of the conditions in the City Hospital on Welfare Island. In 1934, Thurman ironically finds himself within the same hospital where he would live out his final days, and continued to write against the advice of the doctors. From this hospitalization also came "Description of a Male Tuberculosis Ward," an unpublished work that would give a voice to the people inside the ward, using the alias "Male X," to refer to another patient within the facility. Within the work, he says "The patients were worthy of a novel,"Singh & Scott (2003), p. 93 which goes along with Thurman's desire to consistently analyze the social inequity of voices and perspectives that were not often prioritized.
Thurman worked in the late 1920s as a screenwriter for Fox, MGM, and Pathe studios. His film credits as a screenwriter include Tomorrow's Children and High School Girl, both released in 1934.
In 2003, Rutgers University Press issued The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader. It includes three previously unpublished works: " Aunt Hagar's Children, which is a collection of essays, and two full-length plays, Harlem, and Jeremiah the Magnificent". Rutgers University Press
Thurman married Louise Thompson on August 22, 1928, but the marriage lasted only six months. Thompson said that Wallace was a homosexual and refused to admit it, although he rejected the charge. They had no children together.Rampersad (1986), vol. 1, p. 172. Quote: Louise Thompson said, "I never understood Wallace. He took nothing seriously. He laughed about everything. He would often threaten to commit suicide but you knew he would never do it. And he would never admit that he was a homosexual, but he was. Never, never, not to me at any rate." According to a letter Thurman wrote to William Jourdan Rapp, Thompson found out about a 1925 incident when Thurman was arrested after a man propositioned him in a bathroom and told her lawyer, who threatened to charge him with being a homosexual in divorce proceedings. After their divorce Thurman was required to pay Thompson alimony, and in a letter to Rapp he said was recommended to pay "$50 per week for a year—totaling about $2,500," which he started before the divorce was finalized due to Thompson's claim of being broke.
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