The very first sentence in the Introduction reads, "The Harlem Renaissance was a somewhat forced phenomenon, a cultural nationalism of the parlor, institutionally encouraged and directed by leaders of the national civil rights establishment for the paramount purpose of improving race relations." So, it was a more of a top-down activist movement than it ever was a sudden, bottom-up flowering of Black literary and creative talent, and towards the end, there was a bit of an artistic, proletariat revolt against the many rules and restrictions imposed from on high. Another way of saying this is: talent was never the leading light (W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the leaders, warned that indulging in artistic beauty would lead to decadence—you actually get the impression if the leaders had their way, every piece of Harlem Renaissance literature would resemble "The Cosby Show.") Lewis scatters these sorts of critiques throughout the book, so it doesn't at all read like the fawning hagiography you might expect. All that said, while I was excited to run into writers like Claude McKay and Countee Cullen and Walter White and Rudolph Fisher and Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen and Jean Toomer and George Schuyler and Eric Walrond and Zora Neale Hurston—the more rebellious writers being among the more interesting ones—I spent most of the 700-page collection being pretty danged bored. Two stars.