The Crisis Reader

After its start in 1910 The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races magazine became the major outlet for works by African American writers and intellectuals. In 1920 Langston Hughes''s poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers was published in The Crisis and W. E. B. Du Bois the magazine''s editor wrote about the coming renaissance of American Negro literature beginning what is now known as the Harlem Renaissance. The Crisis Reader is a collection of poems short stories plays and essays from this great literary period and includes in addition to four previously unpublished poems by James Weldon Johnson work by Countee Cullen Langston Hughes Jessie Fauset Charles Chesnutt W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke.