Wallace Henry Thurman was an American novelist and screenwriter active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of newspapers and short-lived literary magazines.

Wallace Thurman’s home, 267 West 139th Street, Harlem, was referred to as ‘Niggeratti Manor’.

It wa a place where the black literary elite, the avantgarde of the Harlem Renaissance, regularly gathered. The editor, critic, playwright, novelist, poet and screenwriter was 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 on this day in 1902.He arrived in Harlem in 1925, at the start of the second half of the Renaissance. His first novel Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) exposed prejudice within the black community. Such a work was part of Thurman’s ‘immoral independence’. The gatherings at his home were viewed as a place where the establishment could be challenged. Infants of Spring (1932) was a satire that continued the critical assault on, as he saw it, overrated creative figures, black socialists, who wrote for political purposes rather than focusing on their literary development. Thurman argued that too many black writers wrote to satisfy the black middle class and their white patrons.

The play ‘Harlem’, 1929 was a popular, if not a critical, success. Written with white associate William Rapp, ‘Harlem’ debuted at the Apollo Theatre on February 20th 1929. Following the limited critical and commercial success of “The Intern”, 1932, Thurman wrote two Hollywood screenplays: Tomorrow’s Children and High School Girl, both in 1934.A heavy drinker and suffering from tuberculosis, Wallace Thurman died on December 22nd in 1934. He was thirty-two.(History through the Black Experience by Simon Hudson)