Playing Amanuensis to Inner Urges: Masculinity, Authorial Anxiety, and Wallace Thurman's Typewriter

abstract: Illustrating the evolving cultural logic of "New Negro" authorship and Black masculinity in the 1920s, Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry and Infants of the Spring both depict an unproductive author who meets and is anxious to differentiate himself from the tradesperson the typist represents. Yet, because both characters conform to rather than transcend the stereotypes ascribed to them, Thurman disassembled pervasive social myths that mapped sexual and racial identities onto professional types, in which authorship was perceived masculine/productive labor and typewriting as feminized/reproductive. Blending reality and realism, Thurman's fictions incorporated his widening experiences within a modernising textual economy, especially following his divorce from his former typist Louise Thompson and his literary editorship at Macaulay.