Wallace Thurman is best known for his novel "The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life" (1929), which explores discrimination within the Black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued. He was born in Salt Lake City on August 16th 1902. His father moved to California not long after the birth, leaving Thurman in the care of his mother. It was not until Wallace was 30 years old that he met his father. Between his mother's many marriages, Wallace and his mother lived in Salt Lake City with his maternal grandmother.
Wallace Thurman began grade school at age six in Boise, Idaho, but his poor health eventually led to a two-year absence from school, during which he returned to his grandmother in Salt Lake City. From 1910 to 1914, Thurman lived in Chicago. Moving with his mother, he finished grammar school in Omaha, Nebraska. While living in Pasadena, California in the winter of 1918, Thurman caught influenza during the worldwide Influenza Pandemic. He recovered and returned to Salt Lake City, where he finished high school.
Thurman was a voracious reader. He enjoyed the works of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire and many others. He wrote his first novel at the age of 10. Wallace attended the University of Utah from 1919 to 1920 as a pre-medical student. After a couple of years there, he transferred to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, but left without earning a degree. While in Los Angeles, he met and befriended the writer Arna Bontemps, and became a reporter and columnist for a Black-owned newspaper.
In 1925 Thurman moved to Harlem. Within 10 years of arriving in Harlem, Wallace Thurman had many employments. He was a ghost writer, a publisher, an editor and a writer of novels, plays and articles. He helped launch two short-lived periodicals dedicated to Black artists and wrote three novels and several plays. The leading bohemian figure of Harlem's literary circle, Thurman envisioned a Black literary movement owing itself, not to the patronage of elitist Black intellectuals and Whites.
By the time he became managing editor of the Black periodical the Messenger, a socialist journal aimed at Blacks, in 1926, he had immersed himself in the Harlem literary scene. He encouraged such writers as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston to contribute to his publication. He became the first to publish the adult-themed stories of Langston Hughes. Thurman left the journal in October 1926 to become the editor of "World Tomorrow", which was owned by Whites. The following month, he collaborated in founding the literary magazine Fire!! Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists.
It was a collaboration with Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, Aaron Douglas and Gwendolyn B. Bennett. The publication folded after one issue. The "Fire!!" challenged the ideas of W.E.B Du Bois and many Black bourgeoisie who believed that Black art should serve as propaganda for social equality and racial integration. Thurman criticized them for believing that Black art should serve as propaganda for those ends. He said that the New Negro movement spent too much energy trying to show White Americans that Blacks were respectable and not inferior.
Thurman and others of the young African American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance wanted to show the real lives of African Americans, both the good and the bad. He believed that Black artists should fully acknowledge and celebrate the arduous conditions of African American lives. Thurman and others of the “Niggerati” (the deliberately ironic name he used for the young African American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance) wanted to show the real lives of African Americans, both the good and the bad. Wallace Thurman believed that Black artists should fully acknowledge and celebrate the arduous conditions of African American lives.
During this time, Thurman's rooming house apartment at 267 West 136th Street in Harlem became the main place where the African-American literary avant-garde and visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance met and socialized. Thurman and Hurston mockingly called the room "Niggerati Manor", in reference to all of the Black literati who showed up there. The walls of Niggerati Manor were painted red and black, colors to be emulated on the cover of Fire!! Nugent painted murals on the walls, some of which contained homoerotic content.
He started a magazine, Outlet, intended to be a West Coast equivalent to The Crisis, operated by the NAACP. Langston Hughes described Thurman as "a strangely brilliant black boy, who had read everything and whose critical mind could find something wrong with everything he read." Thurman's dark skin color attracted comment, including negative reactions from both Black and White Americans. He addressed such colorism in his writings, attacking the Black community's preference for its lighter-skinned members.
In 1928, Thurman was asked to edit a magazine called Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life; its contributors included Alain Locke, George Schuyler, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. He put out only two issues. Afterward, Thurman became a reader for a major New York publishing company, the first African American to work in such a position. In 1929 Thurman's play "Harlem: A Melodrama of Negro Life in Harlem", (originally titled Black Belt) opened at the Apollo Theatre. It was written with William Rapp, and opened to mixed reviews, although its bawdy treatment of Harlem life made it a popular success.
His first novel, "The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life", also appeared that year. Like his unfinished play "Black Cinderella", it dealt with color prejudice within the Black community. His novel "Infants of the Spring", a satire of what he believed were the overrated creative figures of the Harlem scene was published in 1932. Some reviewers welcomed Thurman's bold insight, while others vilified him as a racial traitor. He co-authored The "Interne", a final novel with A.L. Furman, published in 1932.