With the 1925 publication of medical intern Rudolph Fisher 's short story "The City of Refuge" in the Atlantic Monthly, the consensus among the black literati of the New Negro cultural movement of the 1920s was that a new member to the circle had arrived. In a 1959 letter Arna Bontemps wrote that through Countee Cullen he had heard of "a young new writer from Washington who had just sold two stories to the Atlantic . This news has gone around literary circles in Harlem, because up to that time none of the young writers of the New Negro Movement had been able to break into that magazine. So the stage was set, and `City of Refuge' created something of a sensation." Langston Hughes described Fisher as "the wittiest" of the Harlem Renaissance group, "whose tongue was flavored with the sharpest and saltiest humor. He and Alain Locke together were great...