![]() ![]() Hurston’s folkloric imagination encompasses the rhythms and the stories, the humor and the wisdom of the Black oral tradition. ![]() Hughes’s jazz- and blues-themed poetry embodies the devotion to the music that would lend its name to the age. ![]() The Harlem Renaissance, generally understood to have spanned the 1920s and the ’30s, is often evoked in the shorthand of famous names - most especially, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. In the case of “Jazz,” however, Morrison’s debt is not to that image alone but to the sustained period of Black intellectual and cultural production we’ve come to call a renaissance. Novels, especially historical novels, often owe debts like this - to a photo or a scrap of prose, a song or a film. In a 2004 foreword, Morrison traces the novel’s premise to an image of a young woman she saw in the photographer James Van Der Zee’s “The Harlem Book of the Dead” (1978), a volume of funerary photographs he began compiling in the 1920s. Toni Morrison’s “Jazz” (1992) is a book born of books. ![]()
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