SOURCE: "Going to School to DuBose Heyward," in The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined, edited by Victor A. Kramer, AMS Press, 1987, pp. 65-91.

In the following essay, Slavick presents an overview of Heyward's works.

DuBose Heyward's brief ascendancy among Southern regionalists in the middle 1920s—as poet, novelist, and playwright—was quickly eclipsed by the emergence of the Fugitive poets, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Thomas Wolfe, and William Faulkner by the end of the decade. Today he is little more than mentioned in discussion of important figures in the Southern Renascence, but his social realism, which juxtaposes the sterility of the white Charleston aristocracy and the possibility of life in the Negro community, deserves recognition.

It is within the framework of the Harlem Renaissance—black writers from Kansas to the Indies and from New Orleans to New York as well as Eugene O'Neill, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Van Vechten, and Waldo Frank...