Fire!!

Fire! was an American literary magazine of the Harlem Renaissance. As a quarterly magazine planned, it only appeared in the November issue of 1926. Was distributed in the New York City borough of Manhattan, in which it carried out the artists involved by hand. Fire! was the voice of the young black generation. These young artists aged 20 to 31 were dissatisfied with the established, older leaders of the movement. The original title was Fire! A Quarterly devoted to the younger Negro artists.

Formation

Starting point of Fire! was the famous artist colony Nigerati Manor in Harlem. This one came in the summer of 1926 with the idea to bring out its own artist magazine. Among the founding members were Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, John P. Davis, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gwendolyn Bennett and Langston Hughes. Each of these authors should contribute with a starting capital of $ 50 for the printing of the first edition. The other expenditure should be financed by the proceeds and donations. This magazine should according to the authors but meet the following requirements:

• The magazine itself should not be construed as documentation of art but are a work of art itself. To this end, much attention was paid to aesthetic aspects, such as quality of the paper, format, etc.
• The magazine should be exclusively " devoted to the younger Negro artist", so to deal exclusively with "young" subjects such as homosexuality. Hughes described the intention of the young writers in his essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, published on June 23, 1926 in The Nation:

• The magazine should be designed also to trigger the greatest scandal in the white and black establishment to drive a media frenzy. A precedent existed in the history of the Harlem Renaissance, when Carl van Vechtens novel Nigger Heaven was banned after publication and thus resulted in a lightning-fast dissemination. This hoped-for publicity boost and the resulting higher sales of the magazine wanted to use the maker to issue a second edition and sponsors to promote their magazine.

The name of the magazine was chosen on the basis of a spiritual director of Langston Hughes.

Content

Aaron Douglas provided the template for the title page and three other drawings ready.

Richard Bruce Nugent participated with two drawings and the short story Smoke, Lilies and Jade.

Wallace Thurman was primarily responsible publisher from him came the editorial comment and a short story, Cordelia the Crude.

Zora Neale Hurston wrote the play Color Struck and the short story Sweat.

Gwendolyn Bennett published a short story, Wedding Day.

Arthur Huff Fauset contributed the essay intelligentsia.

The poem was disputed part of

Countee Cullen, Helene Johnson, Edvard Silvera, Waring Cuney, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps and Alexander Lewis.

With a dollar a 48 -page booklet was four times as expensive as other magazines of the time.

Importance

Fire! was the first joint venture of black writers that came about without the money of wealthy white sponsors. This form of patronage was widespread, with the creators of Fire! but frowned upon. In the end, were then also the financial difficulties of the magazine the reason why a second edition, although planned, was not published and the co-founder (in particular Thurman ) away remained deeply in debt for years.

One group of authors ( among others Thurman and Hughes ) made ​​it with only a single issue, to establish itself as the spokesman of a hitherto unheard generation of young writers. It must also be said that the main intention of the authors was not achieved, namely to scare the black establishment such that there was a scandal and the issue was censored or even banned.

Fire! only found again in the years 1970er/80er attention emerged as a new cultural and literary theories. It was reprinted in the 1980s.

Trivia

In his autobiography, The Big Sea Langston Hughes describes how hundreds of copies of the magazine were destroyed in a basement, where they have been stored by fire.