The New Negro
by Jeffrey C. Stewart
Summary
The New Negro is Jeffrey C. Stewart's monumental biography of Alain Locke, the philosopher who midwifed the Harlem Renaissance, and it restores to the center of American cultural history a figure the general reader had almost lost. Locke's résumé alone justifies the scale: born in Philadelphia in 1885 to the Black elite, he became in 1907 the first African American Rhodes Scholar, a distinction so unwelcome that several Oxford colleges turned him down before Hertford admitted him, and no other Black American was chosen until 1963; he took a Harvard doctorate in philosophy and spent his career at Howard University, where he built a philosophy of culture arguing that a people's arts, not polemics alone, would remake its standing. His hour came in 1925, when he edited the anthology The New Negro, the founding book of the Harlem Renaissance and often described as the founding anthology of Black modernism, gathering Hughes, Hurston, Toomer, and McKay and announcing a generation; for the rest of his life he served as the movement's impresario, critic, and gatekeeper, roles Stewart examines with clear eyes, including the vanities, the feuds, and the patron Charlotte Mason's strings. Stewart, who worked on the book across decades, is equally unflinching and tender about Locke's private life as a gay man, the coded loves and losses that shaped his aesthetics of beauty and freedom. The result is both a life and a cultural history of Black modernism. It won the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the rare double, and it is now the definitive Locke.
Historical Context & Significance
Stewart began studying Locke as a graduate student and carried the project through a full academic career, and the book's nine hundred pages arrived in 2018 into a culture rediscovering the Harlem Renaissance's queer history, a story earlier scholarship had euphemized; his double crown of the National Book Award and Pulitzer measured the achievement. Locke's own reputation had been kept mostly by philosophers and Howard's heirs, while the writers he launched became canonical around him; the biography reversed that eclipse, and a new wave of scholarship and public attention to Locke followed. It stands with the great American literary biographies, a form this list keeps honoring, and Locke now appears where he belonged all along, at the head of the movement's every retelling.