Satirist and critic, George S. Schuyler made his most important contribution to Afro-American literature during the Harlem Renaissance. His novel Black No More (1931) was the first full-length satire on American racism by a black author, while the article "The Negro-Art Hokum" (June 1926) forcefully presented one side of the debate on the "Black Aesthetic." When that debate was renewed during the black arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Schuyler's argument still had a contemporary ring. Following the Harlem Renaissance, Schuyler's career as a newsman and editorial opponent of communism claimed all his attention.

George Samuel Schuyler was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on 25 February 1895 to Eliza Jane Fischer and George S. Schuyler. His northern background enabled him to escape many of the worst effects of turn-of-the-century racism. His respectable middle-class upbringing in a racially mixed area of Syracuse, New York, where he attended public schools from 1902 to 1912, provided...