Fire!! Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists – Vol 1, # 1 (eBook)

Description

Fire!! – Volume One, Number One (1926)

Edited by Wallace Thurman

Before “respectability politics” had a name, Fire!! showed up with a match and a grin.

Published in 1926, Fire!!: A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists was a one-issue literary rebellion that shocked polite society and thrilled everyone hungry for something real. Created by a group of young Black writers and artists at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Fire!! rejected moral caution, racial uplift sermons, and polite silence in favor of desire, colorism, class tension, queerness, anger, beauty, and art that burned hot.

This legendary first and only issue features work by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Bennett, Arna Bontemps, Wallace Thurman, and others, alongside striking visual art by Aaron Douglas. Inside you’ll find short stories, poetry, drama, essays, and illustrations that feel startlingly modern, unapologetically embodied, and fiercely alive.

Some of these pieces were considered scandalous at the time. Some still are.

Fire!! didn’t last long, but its influence has never gone out. It remains a vital document of Black modernism, artistic rebellion, and voices refusing to be tamed.

This ebook presents the complete original contents of Volume One, Number One, faithfully reproduced for contemporary readers.

Public domain. Dangerous ideas. No apologies.

Format: eBook (digital edition)

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