Called the Poet Laureate of Harlem, Hughes spent 1921–22 at the Columbia School of Mines, Engineering and Chemistry before leaving to pursue a writing career.� He chronicled black life in an extraordinary body of work: poems, novels, short stories, plays, musicals, operas, translations, radio and television scripts, magazine articles, two autobiographies, and seven anthologies that he edited.� Hughes loved jazz; much of his writing was done in Harlem jazz clubs and jazz influences run through his work.�

Hurston, who graduated from Barnard College in 1928 and studied anthropology with Franz Boas in 1934–35, wrote eight books, numerous short stories, and magazine articles, and collaborated on the play Mule Bone with Hughes. Widely read in the 1930s and 1940s, Hurston died in obscurity in 1960, her eight books long out of print. In the 1970s, the writer Alice Walker revived interest in her work; today she is again widely known.

A poet, author, songwriter, teacher, and civil rights crusader, Johnson settled in New York in 1901 and briefly studied literature at Columbia.� Among his best known works are the lyrics for the song "Lift Every Voice and Sing" (later known as the "Negro national anthem"); his collection of "seven Negro sermons in verse," God's Trombones; and the first history of African Americans in New York City, Black Manhattan.� Johnson served as field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People while writing and also encouraging young black authors, among them Hughes. In 1930 he left New York for an appointment as professor of creative writing and American literature at Fisk University.�