Harriet A. Washington at The American Scholar:
“Let Paul Robeson singing Water Boy and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem … cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of their own beauty.” So wrote Langston Hughes in his landmark 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Today, Paul Robeson—singer, actor, athlete, lawyer, antiracism icon—needs no introduction. But who was Rudolph Fisher?
You would not have had to ask in 1926. Rudolph John Chauncey Fisher was one of the brightest figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes described him as the “wittiest of these New Negroes of Harlem whose tongue was flavored with the sharpest and saltiest humor. … [He] always frightened me a little, because he could think of the most incisively clever things to say—and I could never think of anything to answer.” Although his star has been eclipsed by Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Hughes himself, Fisher once blazed at the center of this pantheon as a masterly author of short fiction and novels; as a polymath who excelled in science, music, and oratory; and as a physician.
more here.
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