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American novelist

Wallace Henry Thurman (August 16, 1902 – December 22, 1934) was an American novelist and screenwriter active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued.

Thurman was born in Salt Lake City to Beulah and Oscar Thurman. When Thurman was less than a month old, his father abandoned his wife and son. It was not until Wallace was 30 years old that he met his father. Between his mother's many marriages, Wallace and his mother lived in Salt Lake City with Emma Jackson, his maternal grandmother. Jackson ran a saloon from her home, selling alcohol without a license. Thurman's early life was marked by loneliness, family instability, and illness. He began grade school at age six in Boise, Idaho, but his poor health eventually led to a two year absence from school. During this time, he returned to live with his grandmother Emma in Salt Lake City. From 1910 to 1914, Thurman lived in Chicago. Continuing to move with his mother, he finished grammar school in Omaha, Nebraska. During this time, he suffered from repeated heart attacks. While living in Pasadena, California in the winter of 1918, Thurman caught influenza during the worldwide Influenza Pandemic. He recovered and returned to Salt Lake City, where he finished high school. Thurman was a voracious reader. He enjoyed the works of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire and many others. He wrote his first novel at the age of 10. He attended the University of Utah from 1919 to 1920 as a pre medical student. In 1922 he transferred to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, but left without earning a degree. While in Los Angeles, he met and befriended writer Arna Bontemps, and became a reporter and columnist for a black owned newspaper. He started a magazine, Outlet, intended to be a West Coast equivalent to The Crisis, operated by the NAACP.

In 1925 Thurman moved to Harlem, New York City. During the next decade, he worked as a ghostwriter, a publisher, and editor and wrote novels, plays, and articles.</blockquote>

During this time, Thurman's flat in a rooming house, at 267 West 136th Street in Harlem, became the central meeting place of African American literary avant garde and visual artists. Thurman and Hurston mockingly called the room "Niggerati Manor." He had painted the walls red and black, which were the colors he used on the cover of Fire!! Nugent painted murals on the walls, some of which contained homoerotic content. In 1928, Thurman was asked to edit a magazine called Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life; its contributors included Alain Locke, George Schuyler, and Alice Dunbar Nelson. He put out two issues. Afterward, Thurman became a reader for a major New York publishing company, the first African American to work in such a position. Thurman married Louise Thompson on August 22, 1928. The marriage lasted only six months. Thompson said that Wallace was a homosexual and refused to admit it. They had no children together.

Thurman died at the age of 32 from tuberculosis, which many suspect was exacerbated by his long fight with alcoholism.