Rudolph Fisher

Rudolph Fisher (May 9, 1897 - December 26, 1934) was an African-American writer

His first published work, "City of Refuge", appeared in the "Atlantic Monthly" of February 1925. He went on in 1932 to write "The Conjure-Man Dies", the first black detective novel. Fisher was also a physician (with a specialty in radiology), dramatist, musician and orator. Fisher was an active participant in the Harlem Renaissance, primarily as a novelist, but also as a musician.

Biography

Born in Washington, DC in the late nineteenth century, Fisher grew up in Providence, Rhode Island graduating from Classical High School and attending Brown University. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Brown in 1919 and received a Master of Arts a year later. He went on to attend Howard University Medical School and graduated in 1924. Fisher married Jane Ryder in 1925, and they had one son, Hugh, who was born in 1926. Fisher died of cancer in 1934 at the age of 37.

Principal Works

* "City of Refuge" (1925)
* "High Yaller"
* "The Walls of Jericho" (1928), about black life in Harlem
* "The Conjure-Man Dies" (1932)

"City of Refuge" and another short story, "Vestiges", were included in Alain Locke's anthology, "The New Negro".

In 1991, an anthology of Fisher's short fiction, "City of Refuge: The Collected Stories of Rudolph Fisher", was published by the University of Missouri Press.

Quotations

"The rhythm persisted, the unfaltering common meter of blues, but the blueness itself, the sorrow, the despair, began to give way to hope."

ee also

* Countee Cullen
* Langston Hughes
* Zora Neale Hurston
* Wallace Thurman

External links

* [http://www.dclibrary.org/blkren/bios/fisherr.html Fisher's biography at the D.C. Library website]
* [http://www.fishernews.org Rudolph Fisher Newsletter] — includes helpful research resources on the Harlem Renaissance as well as Fisher himself.