Mar 30, 2023 - Sale 2631

Sale 2631 - Lot 236

Price Realized: $ 32,500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
(LITERATURE.) Wallace Thurman, editor. Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. Artwork throughout by Aaron Douglas and Richard Bruce [Nugent]. 48 pages. 4to, 11 x 8 1/2 inches, original red and black wrappers designed by Aaron Douglas; minor wear including small chips at corners, light scuffing on rear wrapper; minimal wear to contents. New York: [Printed by Joseph Leventhal], [22 November 1926]
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Additional Details

The first and only issue of "Fire!!", a controversial and extremely short-lived Harlem Renaissance literary magazine edited by Wallace Thurman (1902-1934). Ahead of its time for its frank discussion of interracial romance, prostitution, and homosexuality, it met with a hostile response from the old guard of the Black press, and folded shortly after the release of its November 1926 first issue.

Contents include: "Cordelia the Crude, a Harlem sketch" by Wallace Thurman; "Color Struck, a Play in Four Scenes," by Zora Neale Hurston; "Wedding Day, a Story" by Gwendolyn Bennett; "Sweat" by Zora Neale Hurston; "Intelligentsia," an essay by Arthur Huff Fauset; and "Fire Burns, a Department of Comment," an essay by Wallace Thurman defending the magazine's controversial benefactor Carl Van Vechten. It also includes a section of poetry titled "Flame from the Dark Tower" with contributions by Countee Cullen, Edward Silvera, Langston Hughes, Helene Johnson, Waring Cuney, Arna Bontemps, and Lewis Alexander. Probably the most controversial was "Smoke, Lilies and Jade," the first installment of a modernist gay-themed stream-of-consciousness novel by Richard Bruce Nugent, who is credited simply as "Richard Bruce."

As contributor Langston Hughes recalled in his autobiography, a fire destroyed the quarterly's office along with the several hundred copies remaining in stock. originals are unsurprisingly scarce today, although reprints have appeared in 1970, 1982, and since. This example was found among the papers of pianist Lawrence Brown (1893-1972) (see lot 206). We trace only one other copy of Fire!! at auction, in a Swann sale on 21 March 2013, lot 382.