Harlem reigned as the exciting center of African-American culture during the decade between the end of Word War I and the Great Depression of the 1930s. With more than ninety illustrations, The Harlem Renaissance shuttles from highbrow literary salons to Prohibition rent parties, charting the complex interactions among Harlem's brilliant writers, stylish hostesses, and savvy culture brokers, who included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, A'Leila Walker, Countee Cullen, and W.E.B. Du Bois, among many others.

This website is directed primarily at teachers of the Harlem Renaissance, whether high school, undergraduate college and graduate college. It is mainly lessons and activities for teaching, with the main focus on "The Harlem Renaissance" book by Steven Watson (Pantheon, 1996, in print, soon available in digital form).
We welcome and encourage teachers to contribute their teaching ideas about this period through specific books (history, biography, novels, poetry) and teaching plans.

Buy it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Book Culture. Now available for Kindle and Ipad (text only).
Gives the reader a grand tour of the time, place, and the driving forces behind one of the nation's greatest cultural flourishings."

- Washington Post Book World

"Rich in detail in its analyses, The Harlem Renaissance is a dazzling piece of work that does full justice to the complexity of a storied era. It captures the vibrant spirit of the Renaissance as very few have done thus far."

- Arnold Rampersad, Princeton University

"Steven Watson takes you there, vividly and immediately, [with] a torrent of images, maps, 'genealogical' charts of artistic and romantic alliances, and inspired marginalia. He indulges every curiosity about just where things happened, who was there and how it all went down."

- Esquire

©2011 Steven Watson.