23 Facts About Wallace Thurman

Wallace Henry Thurman was an American novelist and screenwriter active during the Harlem Renaissance.

Wallace Thurman wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals.

Wallace Thurman is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued.

When Wallace Thurman was less than a month old, his father abandoned his wife and son.

Wallace Thurman began grade school at age six in Boise, Idaho, but his poor health eventually led to a two-year absence from school, during which he returned to his grandmother Emma in Salt Lake City.

Wallace Thurman recovered and returned to Salt Lake City, where he finished high school.

Wallace Thurman enjoyed the works of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire and many others.

Wallace Thurman wrote his first novel at the age of 10.

Wallace Thurman attended the University of Utah from 1919 to 1920 as a pre-medical student.

Wallace Thurman started a magazine, Outlet, intended to be a West Coast equivalent to The Crisis, operated by the NAACP.

Wallace Thurman left the journal in October 1926 to become the editor of World Tomorrow, which was owned by whites.

Wallace Thurman criticized them for believing that black art should serve as propaganda for those ends.

Wallace Thurman said that the New Negro movement spent too much energy trying to show white Americans that blacks were respectable and not inferior.

Wallace Thurman believed that black artists should fully acknowledge and celebrate the arduous conditions of African American lives.

In 1928, Wallace Thurman was asked to edit a magazine called Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life; its contributors included Alain Locke, George Schuyler, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson.

Wallace Thurman used such colorism in his writings, attacking the black community's preference for its lighter-skinned members.

Wallace Thurman wrote a play, Harlem, which debuted on Broadway in 1929 to mixed reviews.

Three years later Wallace Thurman published Infants of the Spring, a satire of the themes and the individuals of the Harlem Renaissance.

Wallace Thurman co-authored his final novel, The Interne, with Abraham L Furman, a white man.

Wallace Thurman worked in the late 1920s as a screenwriter for Fox, MGM, and Pathe studios.

Wallace Thurman publicly denied being gay and feared that others would discover that he was.

Thompson said that Wallace Thurman was a homosexual and refused to admit it.

Wallace Thurman died at the age of 32 from tuberculosis, which many suspect was exacerbated by his long fight with alcoholism.