Fire!!

Fire!!, American magazine that exerted a marked impact on the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and early ’30s despite its demise after the first issue (November 1926).

The idea for the experimental, apolitical African American literary journal was conceived in Washington, D.C., by poet Langston Hughes and writer and graphic artist Richard Nugent. The two, along with an editorial board comprising Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennett, John Davis, and Aaron Douglas, selected the brilliant young critic and novelist Wallace Henry Thurman to edit the publication. Thurman solicited art, poetry, fiction, drama, and essays from his editorial advisers, as well as from such leading figures of the New Negro movement as Countee Cullen and Arna Bontemps.

Responses to the magazine ranged from minimal notice in the white press to heated contention among African American critics. Among the latter, the senior rank of intellectuals, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, tended to dismiss it as self-indulgent, while younger figures reacted with enthusiasm. Financial viability quickly proved unattainable, and several hundred undistributed copies met with an ironic fate when the building they were stored in burned to the ground.