black writers

Gather out of Star-Dust: A Harlem Renaissance Album is a tribute to the Harlem Renaissance, a period of tremendous artistic and cultural achievement among African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s, with New York City's Harlem neighborhood at its epicenter. The book is also based on a current exhibit of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Yale University.

René Maran was born in Martinique, educated in France, and served as a colonial administrator in the French colonies of West Africa.  In 1921, he won the Prix Goncourt for Batouala. He was the first black author to be so honored. Although the book's preface includes a blistering critique of French colonial abuses, Maran asserts that the novel is a story not of black against white, but simply of two men in a Banda village fighting over a woman.