Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance by Carla Kaplan

Carla Kaplan tells the stories of six white women who bankrolled or otherwise thrust themselves into the heart of the Harlem Renaissance.

(Harper, $29)

“Time hasn’t been kind to the white women who participated in the Harlem Renaissance,” said Martha A. Sandweiss in The New York Times. The enduring literature of the era has etched an image of them as patronizing dilettantes, which is just a small step up from the worst that was said about them by contemporaries. Scholar Carla Kaplan neither canonizes them nor echoes critics’ accusations that they were loonies or sex maniacs. Instead, while recounting the stories of six women who bankrolled or otherwise thrust themselves into the heart of a black cultural awakening, she uses their experiences to explore how people on both sides of the color line thought about race. The book is “a remarkable work of historical recovery.”

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