A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the twentieth century to mentor a generation of young artists like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro--the gender ambiguous, transformative, artistic African Americans whose art would subjectivize Black people and embolden greatness. Alain Locke (1885-1954) believed Black Americans were sleeping giant that could transform America into a truly humanistic and pluralistic society. In the 1920s, these views were radical, but by announcing a New Negro in art, literature, music, dance, theatre, Locke shifted the discussion of race from the problem-centered discourses of politics and economics to the new creative industries of American modernism. Although this Europhile detested jazz, he used the Jazz Age interest in Black aesthetics to plant the notion in American minds that Black people were America's quintessential artists and Black urban communities were crucibles of creativity where a different life was possible in America. By promoting art, a Black dandy subjectivized Black people and became in the process a New Negro himself.

The definitive biography of Alain Locke, the first African American Rhodes Scholar and Harvard PhD in philosophy, Howard University philosophy scholar, and architect of the Harlem Renaissance, who mentored a generation of artists including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Nurston and promoted the work of African Americans as the quintessential creators of American modernism. This biography explores his professional and private life, including his relationships withwhite patrons and his lifelong search for love as a gay man.

Jeffrey C. Stewart's comprehensive biography of Locke is a surprisingly gripping read... Locke's life story, beginning as a young black man who was born to a middle-class family in Philadelphia, and who was especially close with his mother, is compelling right from the beginning.