| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Harlem Renaissance: The One and the Many. By Mark Helbling. (Westport: Greenwood, 1999. xii, 211 pp. $57.95, ISBN 0-313-31047-5.)

Mark Helbling's purpose is less sweeping than his title suggests. He focuses on five Harlem Renaissance luminaries (W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston) "who struggled . . . with the tension between the one and the many." Chapter headings, however, link these black writers to white mentors, especially the anthropologists Franz Boas and Melville Herskovits. These mentors are presented, by implication at least, as the pivotal figures of the renaissance. 1

Du Bois is linked with the philosopher Johann von Herder and Boas. Locke is connected to Boas, Herskovits, and the art historians Roger Fry and Albert C. Barnes. Toomer is linked with the writers Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Waldo Frank. Hurston is the protégé of the anthropologists Boas, Herskovits, and Ruth Benedict. Helbling is mysteriously silent on McKay's white mentors. Except in the cases of Hurston and Toomer, the attempt to subordinate black writers to white mentors is often forced. 2

Each chapter presents a literary biography of the writer, including a useful though tedious item-by-item analysis of the subject's work. There are long sections on some of the mentors, while the treatment of others is so scant as hardly to justify their inclusion in the chapter headings. Sometimes the work reads like a dissertation's literature review, with excessive textual references to the opinions of other commentators. . . .

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