Melvin B. Tolson's Harlem Gallery, published in 1965 as the first book of a projected epic, drew impressive literary praise while it offered a demanding critical challenge. The publication here for the first time of A Gallery of Harlem Portraits, Tolson's first book-length collection of poems, will provide scholars and critics a rich insight into how Tolson's literary picture of Harlem evolved. The poems paint lively portraits of Harlem men and women of all colors and ways of life in the 1930s.
A Gallery of Harlem Portraits was written some forty years ago when Tolson was immersed in the writings of the Harlem Renaissance, the subject of his master's thesis at Columbia University. Modeled on Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology and showing the influence of Browning and Whitman, it is rooted in the Harlem Renaissance in its fascination with Harlem's cultural and ethnic diversity and its use of musical forms. Robert Farnsworth's afterword elucidates these and other literary influences.
Tolson eventually attempted to incorporate the technical achievements of T.S. Eliot and the New Criticism into a complex modern poetry which would accurately represent the extraordinary tensions, paradoxes, and sophistication, both highbrow and lowbrow, of modern Harlem. As a consequence his position in literary history is problematical. The publication of this earliest of his manuscripts will help clarify Tolson's achievement and surprise many of his readers with its readily accessible, warmly human poetic portraiture.
