Beloved Harlem: A Literary Tribute to Black America's Most Famous Neighborhood, From the Classics to The Contemporary

William H. Banks offers a collection of 29 excerpts and short stories that emphasize black literary culture. The book is sectioned into four illuminating parts. Part I: The Descendants of Slaves Emancipate a Culture, Part II: The Thunder Roars, Part III: And Then We Make Thunder and Part IV: New Voices Reflect, Recount, and Reinvent. He prefaces the parts with a short biography of the authors and the literary context of each part. Part I, the years from the 1910s through the 1930s, named the Harlem Renaissance, boasts of the contributions of such notables as James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. DuBois, white author Carl Van Vechten, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston. Although part II, the years from the 1940s through the 1960s, after the Great Depression, and the ending of the Harlem Renaissance, was not quite as noteworthy, it still produced notable writers Dorothy West, James Baldwin, and Langston Hughes. Part III the years from 1970-2000 includes works by Louise Merriweather, John A. Williams, Grace F. Edwards, Toni Morrison, and Walter Dean Myers. And last in part IV, Banks explores some new voices that are reinventing Harlem literature, Rosemarie Robotham and Brian Keith Jackson. BELOVED HARLEM, edited by one of its celebrated native sons, is a poignant look into the vibrancy of the African-American literary world and the asylum the writers found within the diversity of Harlem life. The chronological order of this presentation, as it reflects on life in black Manhattan, connects these historically famous writers in a most profound way. I loved reading this book. Reviewed by aNN of The RAWSISTAZ™ Reviewers