Black Christ and Other Poems explores the relationship between race and religion, centering on the injustice faced by African Americans. Published by Harper and Brothers in 1929, at the height of his career, this book of poetry draws explicit parallels between the suffering of a crucified Christ and the suffering of African Americans in the climate of racial violence that characterized the 1920s. The illustrations, which are both compelling and highly visual, are similar to those in Charles Cullen's prior work on Weldon Johnson’s Ebony and Topaz and Cullen’s 1927 work, Copper Sun and Ballad of the Brown Girl. This limited edition first edition, of which only 128 were printed, is printed on handmade paper, and signed by the author.

View Countee Cullen's author files, part of the Records of Harper & Brothers, 1909 - 1960 by visiting Special Collections.

This early work of science fiction, authors Jane and Robert Speller tells the story of Lilith drawing on the widespread mythology surrounding Adam’s first wife. Lilith is the central protagonist, telling her story herself. The Speller’s telling evocation interweaves historical and mythical narratives of Lilith, drawing from stories of ancient Babylon, scholarship on Sumerian Civilization (the earliest known civilization in southern Mesopotamia), and Jewish folklore. Lilith, previously a mere mortal, emerges as an ethereal and immortal figure, living nearly seven thousand years by prolonging her immortality through her excessive consumption, of both love and lust and of sacred mushrooms. The novel is a complicated tale of marriage, politics, seduction, and female bodily autonomy. This copy features the original dust jacket, with stunning artwork. The work also includes a brief glossary of Sumerian terms used by the authors.

The Chicago-born Lynd Ward (1905–1985), is often regarded as one of the great figures of book illustration. Inspired by his post-graduate stay in Germany, where Ward studied illustration, he began working on Gods’ Man, a wordless novel in 139 woodblock prints. While woodblock works had previously been printed in Europe, Ward’s Gods’ Man was the first publication of its kind in the United States. Despite the onset of the Great Depression, the work was an instant success, rapidly moving through 6 editions and selling 20,000 copies. Readers were drawn to this new genre of literary work. The innovative technique created a striking contrast of light and dark. Ward, ever the talented wood engraver and printmaker, uses the woodcut to fill the story with shadows, evoking foreboding, ominous encounters, and despair in an illustrative style that intermixes Art Deco's recognizable beauty with the stern lines of German expressionism.

The narrative engages a recognizable narrative trope, a modernist morality play where a young protagonist strikes a deadly bargain. A Faustian tale of ambition, love, and greed, the work features scenes of sex, violence, and death within a suspenseful and carefully linked narrative. In the story, a naïve artist signs a contract with a masked stranger in exchange for a brush. While his newly executed talent propels him into fame, he soon finds his life burdened by the excesses of wealth. In its unbridled use of drama, deep characterization, dark imagery, and masterful technique, Ward’s work is widely believed to have influenced the development of the graphic novel. This copy is bears an inscription from Princeton professor, alumni (class of 1919) and lithographer, Francis Comstock to American architect, Jean Labatut, reading "je suis très heureux de donner un livre à Jean Labatut, si facile à lire | I am very happy to give a book to Jean Labatut, so easy to read."

View Jean Labatut papers, related to his major and minor projects, including the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair, the Monument to José Martí (Havana, Cuba), the Stuart Country Day School of the Sacred Heart (Princeton, New Jersey), by visiting Special Collections.

Nella Larsen’s second novel, published shortly after her well-received first novel, Quicksand, reflects upon the taboo topics of racial passing and internal class politics about the Black bourgeoisie. The novel is set in Harlem’s Sugar Hill in 1927, “where beautiful Black socialites swirl about in designer gowns.” The protagonist, Clare passes as white both to her husband and their social circle, however, a chance encounter with a childhood friend Irene, brings her into the social world of Black middle-class Harlemites. With increasing frequency, Clare begins transgressing the geographic boundaries that separate her familial life with her husband and child, to spend time amongst other black people, putting her marriage, her economic security, and her daughter’s future in jeopardy should she be discovered to have African ancestry.

As an insightful critique of race, gender, and sexuality, and in particular the blurriness of all three, Larsen’s novel reflects upon and responds to a moment of growing anxiety about white Americans around the crossing of racial boundaries, a seeming symptom of new waves of immigration from the American South of African American as a result of the Great Migration. Whereas the one-drop rule sought to maintain and harden racial classification between Whites and Blacks, the movement of African Americans, many of whom were of mixed ancestry, challenged to expose these classifications as illusory and permeable. This ambiguity extends into the novel's structure, in a contemporaneous review, Alice Dunbar Walker praises the novel, and in particular its ending, “to read it, and then discuss it, and ask about ten of your friends for their version of the ending, and get the ten different versions you are bound to get.”

While Larsen’s work was immediately heralded as a classic by her peers, WEB Dubois declared it, “one of the finest novels of the year,” and she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship the following year (1930), becoming the first Black woman to do so. Passing, however, would be her final work, she would soon withdraw from literary circles and return to a prior career in nursing.

As a member of the French diplomat service, Paul Morand traveled widely around France’s current and former colonial, boasting that he had traveled “30,000 miles [to] 28 negro countries” between 1925 and 1927, to Martinique, Haiti, French colonial possessions in Africa such as French Guinea, French Sudan, and Senegal in addition to places like Cuba, Trinidad, and the United States. While in the U.S., Morand frequented Harlem in the company of Carl Van Vecten, a central cultural future and financial sponsor to many Harlem Renaissance authors. These combined experiences inspired Morand to write and subsequently publish Magie Noire, a fictionalized version of his travels, in 1928. Heinemann Press published the English translation, Black Magic the following year in 1929.

The work reflected a contemporaneous French obsession with African exotism in the interwar period, and its writing ref a kind of “ethnographic vogue.” In the work, black subjects are depicted in grotesque and often otherworldly, the title draws its name from the underlying theme that leans heavily into the supernatural assumptions Morand makes about black cultural expression, including those of religious practices like Haitian Vodou. Despite being well-received in France, and amongst white readers, the work was a source of dismay for many African American and Caribbean writers, thus receiving a cool reception amongst African American intellectuals. Aime Cesaire’s 1933 Cahier d’un Retour au pays Natal was reportedly inspired by his desire to rebuke the racialized depictions in Magie Noire, particularly in his chapter "Black Tsar".

Douglas’s illustration stood in stark contrast to the narrative advanced by Morand’s narrative. Douglas takes the opportunity to interject dynamic and empowered imagery in subversive contrast to the text, seemingly inspired by Haiti. Scholars have noted that Douglas appears to purposefully obscure Morands inclusion of cannibalism in the text, as a means of reinforcing commonplace stereotypes of Black primitivism.

Claude McKay rose to fame as a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance with the publication of the poem "If We Must Die," shortly thereafter followed but he publication of his first novel, Home to Harlem in 1928. By the 1920s, however, McKay was spending much of his time living and writing from abroad. While living in Paris, McKay began working on his Banjo, which bears the subtitle, “a novel without a plot.” A fictional account of McKay’s life in Marseilles, the work instead was constructed as a series of descriptive episodes of the life of Black expatriates in Southern France. The work centers around Black seamen in Southern France, in particular, the novel’s vagabond protagonist, Banjo who, like McKay, represents the intersection of African, Caribbean, and American identities. In portraying a vast difference in the treatment of Black colonials in France, the novel explores the complexities of racial and cultural identity within the context of colonialism and the broader African diaspora. In his review of Banjo, WEB Dubois describes the novel's orientation of diasporic, and notes that it seeks to contribute to an “international philosophy of the Negro race.” In particular, the novel launches a targeted criticism against racism and classism in America. McKay’s character, in pursuing an unmoored and vagabond lifestyle, demonstrates the power of the individual to resist bounded stasis by working within the system rather than outside of it. The themes throughout the novel reveal McKay’s belief in the importance of Marxist and anti-imperialist thought to the Harlem Renaissance literature.

Wallace Thurman’s first novel, Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, was controversial and divisive upon its publication for its portrayal of prejudice within the Black community. The novel reckons with the subject of colorism, as experienced by Emma Lou, a young woman who is unable to escape prejudice about her dark skin complexion despite moving from Idaho to Harlem, seen as a Black Mecca in the 1920s. who experiences prejudice both in Boise Idaho, a young woman must reckon with colorism in the Black community and internalized loathing as she navigates 1920s New York City. As a coming-of-age story of a Black, middle-class female protagonist, the novel follows the intersection between race, gender, and sexuality while it interrogates Harlem’s reputation as a boundless and limitless Mecca for Black people.

Blacker the Berry was one of the most widely read and controversial works of the Harlem Renaissance, in part because Thurman openly acknowledges the prevalence of intra-racial prejudice, explores the entrenchment of white supremacist ideologies within Black communities, and seeming privileging of lighter skin and more Eurocentric features embraced by Black people. Langston Hughes dismisses the novel, arguing that Thurman bitterness about his own dark skin is the inspiration for the novel. Thurman received much criticism from his peers for this work, WEB Dubois was particularly harsh in his criticism, condemning the work's licentiousness and sexual expression, noting that the work undermined the goal of racial uplift. Scholars revisiting the novel after its republication in the 1970s, find renewed value in Thurman’s work, arguing that Thurman’s stance reflects a staunch and revolutionary to individuality and critical objectivity. Thurman chose not to pander to the aesthetic preferences of the black middle class (Dubois), nor write for an easy and patronizing white approval, an accusation that can and has been leveled at those working with Carl Van Vechten, including Langston Hughes.

Swiss-born, Blaise Cendrars, who was influential in the European modernist movement, published several works on Sub-Saharan Africa in the early 20th century. In 1921, he released Anthology Negre, one of the first compilations of African oral literature in French (it was later translated and published in English). Cendrars has a long-standing fascination with Africa, however, scholars noted that his appropriation of African source material reflected a broader avant-garde fascination with non-European art and culture. Some scholars have argued that the tone and imagery were reminiscent of the paternalist and patronizing rhetoric of many colonial missionaries and administrators of the time.

This work, oriented toward white youth audiences, was first published as Petits contes nègres pour les enfants des blancsin 1928 and was released in English the following year. It drew from unpublished intended for his second anthology of stories and was accompanied by illustrated woodcuts designed and produced by Pierre Pinsard, depicting animals found on the African continent. While the title might appear derisive by today’s standards, the work was well-received and extremely popular. It was lauded by writers at the Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People founded by W.E.B. Dubois; a positive review noted that “all children will find these stories beautiful.”

Throughout her career, poet Louise Bogan defied expectations. Raised in a working-class Irish family in rural Maine, she dropped out of college after her first year to move to New York and pursue writing. There, she wrote lyrical, formal poetry that contrasted the experimental wave that overtook the post-war period. As the New York Times summarized in her 1970 obituary, “With a supple syntax, Miss Bogan created subtle structures of delicate, but intense words that were rich in passion and robust in irony.” It was these accomplishments that garnered Bogan almost every conceivable poetry prize over the course of her career, including the honor of being named the first woman Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress in 1945 and serving as the poetry critic for the New Yorker for 38 years.

Her second collection, Dark Summer, entered the public domain in 2025. Princeton’s copy is particularly special as it is inscribed by Bogan to her mentor, American poet Ridgely Torrance.