As a cultural center, Harlem arose after the early careers of two whose lives and work would become inextricably linked with their adopted home town. For many, W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson personified Harlem’s intellectual wealth. Born three years apart, and within a decade of the Civil War’s end, each man was in his fifties during the 1920s, the era’s high-water mark. Du Bois’s active career, in fact, would continue decades beyond the relatively brief period of the Renaissance. Yet their creative contributions set the stage for the literary efflorescence of the 1920s and 1930s.

W. E. B. Du Bois was born in Massachusetts in 1868, making him the most senior of those connected with the Renaissance. He lived for nearly a century, his publications appearing over a span of years longer than most American lifetimes. Educated at Fisk, Harvard, and Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, Du Bois pushed his talents in many directions. The Souls of Black Folk, which he published in 1903, displays this protean thinker’s ability to mix uplift and social insight with lyricism and emotion. Drawn from Du Bois’s own experiences in the South as both student and teacher, Souls is rightly considered an African American – indeed, an American – classic. The Souls of Black Folk encompasses many genres: the essay, sociological study, musicology, fiction, autobiography, and philosophy. In this sense, Du Bois’s most widely read work is paradigmatically modernist in form; the hybridity of form of Souls may in fact account for its longevity and success in our contemporary estimations.