Infants of the Spring

The second novel by a lading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Infants of the Spring is one of the most potent satires of that era and a retort to the idealized vision of Harlem's artistic community between WW1 and the Depression.

The story centers on Niggeratti Manor, fashioned after the rooming house in which Wallace Thurman once live with other black artists and writers. The protagonist, talented and ambitious novelist Raymond Taylor, has difficulty producing serious work in the decadent atmosphere of the Manor, where the residents consciously pursue a Bohemian lifestyle that inevitably leads to their eviction. Taylor and his friends are also affected varying degrees by the racism that the optimism of the Harlem Renaissance occasionally obscured but never eliminated. Infants of the Spring portends the ultimate demise of the Harlem Renaissance itself, and it is one of the few books to acknowledge that homosexuality was very much a part of that era.