About Fire!!

Fire!!

Fire!! was an African American literary magazine published in New York City, New York, in November 1926, during the Harlem Renaissance. Its full title announced its programme: Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. It published exactly one issue. Edited by Wallace Thurman and created by the self-named Niggerati circle — Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, John P. Davis, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gwendolyn Bennett, Lewis Grandison Alexander, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes — it set out, in Hughes's later summary of its purpose, to burn up the old, dead conventional ideas of the past and to win younger Black writers and artists an outlet of their own.

The single issue contained a play and a short story by Hurston, poems by Hughes, Cullen and six others, fiction by Thurman, Bennett and Nugent — including the first explicitly gay work published in an African American literary magazine — and art by Aaron Douglas and Nugent. It was denounced by the Black establishment, banned from open sale in Boston, destroyed financially by debt and then physically when its stored copies and headquarters burned. A century later it is treated as a historical event in its own right, taught, reprinted, exhibited and dramatised, and its centenary is being marked by a major exhibition at Yale's Beinecke Library in 2026 and 2027.

The Niggerati and the idea of a younger magazine

Fire!! was conceived by a circle of young Black writers and artists in Harlem who called themselves, with deliberate, self-mocking provocation, the Niggerati. They were the younger generation of the New Negro movement, centred on the salon at 267 West 136th Street that was nicknamed the Niggerati Manor in movement lore, and they believed the established Black magazines offered too few pages and too many restrictions to the work they wanted to make. The older generation of leaders, associated with Alain Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois, valued art partly as evidence of racial achievement and respectability. The Fire!! founders wanted instead to represent Black life in a modern and realistic fashion, in vernacular language, including the parts of that life respectability preferred not to print.

Wallace Thurman, the group's organiser and the magazine's editor, solicited art, poetry, fiction, drama and essays from his editorial advisers and from leading New Negro figures including Countee Cullen and Arna Bontemps. The declared subject was the younger Negro artist, and the declared method was honesty: the issue would explore homosexuality, bisexuality, interracial relationships, promiscuity, prostitution and colour prejudice within the Black community, subjects that the founders argued literature of enlightenment could not avoid. The title itself was the manifesto — fire as the destruction of old ideas to clear ground for new art.

The single issue of November 1926

The first and only issue appeared in November 1926, dated to the 15th of that month in centenary accounts, with cover designs and decorations by Aaron Douglas, whose red-and-black art deco imagery gave the magazine an instantly recognisable visual identity. Thurman opened the contents with his Harlem sketch about a prostitute, Cordelia, a choice of lead story that announced the magazine's refusal of uplift conventions as clearly as any editorial could have done. His editorial comment closed the issue under the heading Fire Burns.

Zora Neale Hurston contributed two works: the play in four scenes about colour prejudice within a Black community, and the short story Sweat, about a washerwoman and her husband, which became one of her most anthologised stories. A central poetry section gathered work by Countee Cullen, Helene Johnson, Edward Silvera, Waring Cuney, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps and Lewis Alexander. Gwendolyn Bennett contributed the story Wedding Day, Arthur Huff Fauset an essay on the intelligentsia, and Richard Bruce Nugent contributed drawings and the opening instalment of his novel in a lyrical prose style unlike anything else in Black publishing of the moment.

Nugent, Hurston and the issue's boldest work

Nugent's contribution, Smoke, Lilies and Jade, has attracted the most scholarly attention of any piece in the issue. A stream-of-consciousness narrative of a young artist's desires, including desire for a man, it is recognised as the first explicitly gay text published in an African American literary periodical, and it made Nugent, who lived openly as a gay man in Harlem, a foundational figure in Black queer literary history. Its presence in a magazine financed and edited by his peers shows how seriously the group's commitment to uncensored realism was meant: the issue defended in practice a writer whom both white and Black publishing of 1926 would ordinarily have excluded entirely.

Hurston's two contributions show the other pole of the magazine's method. Her play dramatised colourism — prejudice based on skin shade among Black people themselves — and her story rendered a Southern Black woman's working life and marriage in dialect that honoured vernacular speech as literary language. Together with Bennett's story of an interracial encounter abroad and Thurman's Harlem sketch, the fiction of Fire!! insisted that the full range of Black experience, including its internal divisions and its disreputable corners, was proper material for serious art.

Reception: offence, denunciation and one good review

The magazine was not well received by the Black public it addressed. Many readers and leaders felt it failed to project the sophisticated self-image of Harlem Black life and instead trafficked in the very stereotypes — dialect, prostitution, loose living — that racial uplift existed to refute. The Talented Tenth leadership denounced the effort as decadent and vulgar, and younger writers' enthusiasm was matched by senior intellectuals' dismissal of the venture as self-indulgent; Du Bois's circle tended toward the latter view. In the phrase that has attached itself permanently to the magazine's reception, the critic of the Baltimore Afro-American wrote that he had simply thrown his copy into the fire.

Sales were poor, and in Boston they were banned outright; in Harlem itself the magazine was not openly placed on shop shelves. The white press paid it minimal notice, with one prominent exception: The Bookman applauded the journal's unique qualities and personality. The asymmetry is the historical point. Fire!! was not suppressed primarily by white censorship but judged, and found wanting, by the standards of its own community's establishment — which is precisely the argument about artistic freedom that its makers had set out to have, and lost, in 1926.

Debt, literal fire and the end

The venture was plagued by debt from the start. The founders had financed the issue on promises and credit; Thurman himself was robbed of $1,000 intended for the printer on his way to pay, in an episode retold in every subsequent dramatisation of the story. Unsold copies were stored at the magazine's quarters, and shortly after the first issue appeared the headquarters burned, destroying the stock that might have been sold to pay the printer and the other creditors. A quarterly that had sold one issue, offended its natural constituency and lost its inventory in a fire had no path to a second number, and Fire!! ended there.

The founders dispersed into the careers for which they are now famous. Hughes and Hurston became the best-known writers of the Harlem Renaissance; Cullen was already a celebrated poet; Douglas became its defining visual artist; Bennett, Bontemps and Fauset continued as writers and educators; Nugent lived until 1987, long enough to be rediscovered as a pioneer; and Thurman, who published novels including The Blacker the Berry, died young in 1934. None of them ever produced the second issue, and the magazine's unfinished state — Nugent's novel printed as Part I of a work whose continuation never appeared — became part of its poignancy.

Rediscovery and scholarly standing

For decades Fire!! survived as a rare object and a citation: a single issue, considered an event of historical importance in Harlem Renaissance scholarship, preserved in collections such as the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection at Yale's Beinecke Library and reprinted in facsimile in scholarly editions of Black periodicals. As Renaissance studies expanded from the 1970s onward, and especially as scholars recovered the movement's women and its queer writers, the magazine's stock rose steadily. What 1926 judged as vulgarity, later criticism read as candour; what was dismissed as self-indulgence came to be read as an early manifesto for Black art made for art's sake, free of the duty to represent the race favourably.

The centenary has formalised that reversal. The Beinecke Library's exhibition marking one hundred years since the issue of 15 November 1926 runs from October 2026 to May 2027 and displays correspondence, drafts, photographs and artworks from the Johnson collection, presenting the magazine as a transgression of its era's social codes and a manifesto of artistic freedom by the younger New Negro generation — the very terms in which its makers had described it and for which they had been condemned.

Fire!! on stage and screen

The story of the magazine has proved unusually dramatisable, because its cast became famous and its arc — youth, brilliance, scandal, debt and literal fire — is complete in a single season. The 2004 film Brother to Brother built its narrative around an elderly Nugent recounting the Fire!! circle to a young gay Black student. Carl Hancock Rux's play taking its title from Nugent's story was developed at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, and Jenifer Nii's 45-minute play about Thurman and the production of Fire!! premiered at Plan B Theatre in Salt Lake City in 2010.

Most recently, in October 2025, Quintessence Theatre Group at the Sedgwick Theater in Mount Airy, Philadelphia, premiered a full stage work by Marilyn Campbell-Lowe and Paul Oakley Stovall, in which Thurman, in debt to his publisher, gathers the other contributors to perform the issue's stories for prospective benefactors. A BBC radio documentary on the magazine likewise framed it as an explosive attempt to replace the inherited canon with brutally honest depictions of African American life. Each retelling returns to the same source, because there is only one issue to return to.

Legacy of a one-issue magazine

Fire!! is the standard American example of influence without longevity. It demonstrated, a generation before the little-magazine and independent-press movements generalised the lesson, that a single issue could change what a literature permitted itself to say: about sexuality, about colour within a community, about dialect as art, and about the right of young artists to refuse the representational duties their elders assigned them. Every subsequent Black literary rebellion that announced itself against respectability has been measured, by scholars, against the standard set in November 1926.

Its makers paid for the demonstration with debt, denunciation and, in the fire that destroyed their stock, a conclusion so literal that it would seem contrived in fiction. The magazine they named for burning up the past is now preserved in the country's leading rare-book library and celebrated on stage in its centenary season, which its founders, who could not sell it openly in Harlem, would have recognised as the longest and best of the jokes the Niggerati played on posterity.

Publication facts

Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists was published in New York City, New York, confirming this directory's listing, in November 1926. It published one issue. Its editor was Wallace Thurman, and its founders and contributors included Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, John P. Davis, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gwendolyn Bennett, Lewis Grandison Alexander, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Helene Johnson, Waring Cuney, Edward Silvera and Arthur Huff Fauset. No second issue ever appeared; a complete scan of the sole issue circulates through Project Gutenberg and library facsimiles.