Some years back, I watched a movie set during the Harlem Renaissance, and the characters were putting together this literary magazine called FIRE!!. So naturally I wanted to read it… and it turns out that somebody (in 1982) did a facsimile edition of this 1926 magazine.
So for today’s book club reading, we don’t have a book! But a magazine! So controversial!
I guess Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston are the most famous authors here?
The movie was partly about the pushback the people involved got because the magazine just wasn’t “respectable”. And indeed, in the very first sentence, we get a prostitute, and the magazine kinda goes on that way in a gleeful way.
It’s obviously a magazine done by young people, and not all the pieces feel totally successful to me.
I liked this poem by Hughes, and the short story by Hurston is probably the strongest piece in here.
In addition to the short stories, there’s also some illustration and a play, and also some polemic about a controversial book by Carl Van Vechten — Wallace Thurman defends it, in a somewhat backhanded way.
It’s a good magazine, and I’m not surprised that there was only one issue.
Fire!! a Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists (1926) by Wallace Thurman (buy used, 4.37 on Goodreads)
