The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke - Hardcover

Stewart creates a compelling portrait of Locke ... as well providing rich contextual background and insights into the cultural and political debates out which his subject emerged. (Douglas Field, Times Literary Supplement)

This biography is a work of profound learning and keen insight, with deep wells of empathy. (Daniel Matlin, Literary Review)

Locke represents a biographical challenge of unusual difficulty. Superbly educated, dazzlingly intelligent, psychologically complicated, and a cultural analyst and visionary whose books and essays helped to shape our understanding of race and modern American culture, Locke could also be petty and vindictive, manipulative and cruel. Also stamping his identity was his brave commitment to living fully as a gay man, despite its various dangers. Jeffrey Stewart, rising superbly to this challenge, has given us one of the finest literary biographies to appear in recent years. (Arnold Rampersad, Stanford University)

Jeffrey Stewart's long anticipated biography of the enigmatic Alain Locke fulfills its promise-and then some. It is magnificent! A panoramic portrait of one of the great thinkers, teachers, and literary entrepreneurs of the early twentieth century, The New Negro sheds fresh light on the intellectual firmament whose brightest star discovered African American modernism in an era of cosmopolitanism, colonialism, and catastrophe, and the man whose complex and tragic life left him defeated, unfulfilled, and underappreciated. . . . until now. (Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original)

More than an account of Locke's professional and academic life, Stewart's book offers an integrated vision of Locke's professional and personal life and many details on the innermost aspects of Locke's personal life. This is without question one of the most comprehensive and insightful biographies of an important African American intellectual. Readers will be greatly rewarded for investing their time in its penetrating and revealing pages. (Jacoby Carter, CUNY John Jay College)

Stewart creates a poignant portrait of a formidable yet flawed genius who navigated the cultural boundaries and barriers of his time while nurturing an enduring African-American intellectual movement. (Publishers Weekly, Starred Review)

A magisterial biography... it brilliantly doubles as a history of the philosophical debates that girded black artistic triumphs early in the 20th century. A sweeping biography that gets deep into not just the man, but the movements he supported, resisted, and inspired. (Kirkus, Starred Review)

[A] comprehensive, richly contextualized portrait of a key writer, educator, philosopher, and supporter of the arts. (Booklist, Starred Review)

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke is a vitally important, astonishingly well researched, exhaustive biography of the brilliant, complex, flawed, utterly fascinating man who, if he did not start the movement, served as its curator, intellectual champion, and guiding spirit... It is difficult to imagine a more able chronicler of Alain Locke's singular journey than Mr. Stewart. (Wall Street Journal)

In describing Locke's life as a black man, a thinker and fighter in social causes, and a homosexual, Stewart... must in a way describe many different Alain Lockes. That such a gripping and cohesive narrative could be forged out of such fractured material is no mean accomplishment... Locke himself was constantly re-inventing in a life that defied easy categorization. Jeffrey Stewart has written the definitive study that life has always warranted - and, fittingly, he's made it excellent reading in the process. (Christian Science Monitor)

A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the twentieth century to mentor a generation of young artists like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro―the gender ambiguous, transformative, artistic African Americans whose art would subjectivize Black people and embolden greatness.

Alain Locke (1885-1954) believed Black Americans were sleeping giant that could transform America into a truly humanistic and pluralistic society. In the 1920s, these views were radical, but by announcing a New Negro in art, literature, music, dance, theatre, Locke shifted the discussion of race from the problem-centered discourses of politics and economics to the new creative industries of American modernism. Although this Europhile detested jazz, he used the Jazz Age interest in Black aesthetics to plant the notion in American minds that Black people were America's quintessential artists and Black urban communities were crucibles of creativity where a different life was possible in America. By promoting art, a Black dandy subjectivized Black people and became in the process a New Negro himself.