Scholars-in-Residence Fellowship Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

FAIN: RA-20189-98

New York Public Library (New York, NY 10016-0109)
Howard Dodson (Project Director: October 1996 to October 2002)

To support two fellowships at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture each year for two years.

Associated Products

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Book)
Title: The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke
Author: Jeffrey C. Stewart
Abstract: A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the century to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro--the creative African Americans whose art, literature, music, and drama would inspire Black people to greatness. In The New Negro : The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar and earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. Locke also received a cosmopolitan, aesthetic education through his travels in continental Europe, where he came to appreciate the beauty of art and experienced a freedom unknown to him in the United States. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America and his promotion of the literary and artistic work of African Americans as the quintessential creations of American modernism. In the process he looked to Africa to find the proud and beautiful roots of the race. Shifting the discussion of race from politics and economics to the arts, he helped establish the idea that Black urban communities could be crucibles of creativity. Stewart explores both Locke's professional and private life, including his relationships with his mother, his friends, and his white patrons, as well as his lifelong search for love as a gay man. Stewart's thought-provoking biography recreates the worlds of this illustrious, enigmatic man who, in promoting the cultural heritage of Black people, became--in the process--a New Negro himself.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/new-negro-the-life-of-alain-locke/oclc/1026899931&referer=brief_results
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780195089578
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Prizes

Pulitzer Prize for Biography
Date: 4/15/2019
Organization: The Pulitzer Prizes
Abstract: "A panoramic view of the personal trials and artistic triumphs of the father of the Harlem Renaissance and the movement he inspired."

2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction
Date: 11/1/2018
Organization: National Book Foundation

PROSE Award for Best Biography/ Autobiography
Date: 2/7/2019
Organization: Association of American Publishers

Mark Lynton History Prize
Date: 3/20/2019
Organization: Columbia Journalism School
Abstract: awarded to a book "of history, on any subject, that best combines intellectual or scholarly distinction with felicity of expression".

2019 Award for Nonfiction
Date: 1/26/2019
Organization: Black Caucus of the American Library Association

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