The Last Book of the Harlem Renaissance

God Sends Sunday was the last book of the Harlem Renaissance.

It was published in 1931 by one of New York’s major publishers. It appeared in bookstores more than a decade after the start of the concentrated upsurge in artistic creation by African Americans, centered in Harlem, that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. The book’s author was a relative latecomer to Harlem: Arna Bontemps moved there in 1924, after graduating from college in California. He began teaching at the Harlem Academy, and he put himself into the middle of Harlem’s artistic tumult through friendships with other writers and a string of prizes that he won for his poetry in 1926 and 1927.

But the stock market collapsed in late 1929, and the economic disorder that evolved into the Great Depression began to spread. Bontemps continued teaching while he was writing what would become God Sends Sunday. Harcourt, Brace agreed to publish the book in 1931, and it received generally positive reviews. Yet larger forces buffeted Bontemps and those around him. As he wrote, drily, in 1968:

Within weeks after the publication of my first book, as it happened, I had been caught up in a quaint and poignant disorder that failed to attract wide attention. It was one of the side effects of the crash that brought on the Depression, and it brought instant havoc to the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties. I was one of the hopeful young people displaced, so to speak. The jobs we had counted on to keep us alive and writing in New York vanished, as some observed, quicker than a cat could wink.

Bontemps’s job at the Harlem Academy ended in 1931; he and his family moved to Alabama, where he taught at a small college and continued writing and also meeting and corresponding with those he had met in Harlem. He would eventually end up in Chicago, and then at Fisk University in Nashville, and become one of the most important chroniclers of the Harlem Renaissance and of African American literary culture.

God Sends Sunday was not the last book of the Harlem Renaissance solely because it was published at a time when economic and social forces were dispersing Harlem’s concentration of writers and artists. Bontemps’s novel also showed some of the dissatisfaction that younger Black writers felt toward what they saw as older writers’ attempts to conform to white middle-class expectations about respectability and success. God Sends Sunday is a novel about a jockey in St. Louis; it deals in violence and sex and sports and drinking and failure among African Americans, and its rendering of that world, and particularly its speech, is lyrical and vivid. W.E.B. Du Bois was among those who did not give the novel a positive review; he criticized its lack of uplift and labeled it “a profound disappointment.” But it was this sort of perspective that Bontemps was pushing back against. So too, Bontemps based the novel’s main character, Little Augie, on his Uncle Buddy—on a real life, in other words, lived by a real, complicated man.

Richard Wright would most ferociously express this resistance to a Du Bois-like perspective in the late 1930s and ’40s, and his work, among others’, would represent a decisive break from that of the Harlem Renaissance. Bontemps himself would continue to push in a similar direction with his next novel, Black Thunder, published in 1936, about a failed slave revolt in Virginia. It would become a more popular book than God Sends Sunday. But God Sends Sunday remains, as the last book of one of the most extraordinary eras of creativity in American history, a more significant milestone.