Rudolph Fisher

Fisher, Rudolph (1897–1934), novelist, short story writer, and leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance. In his short stories and two published novels Rudolph Fisher was concerned with the development of an urban community with few models to guide it. This was a community that, jazzlike, had to improvise against the history of the rural South and creeping disillusionment with the urban North.

Rudolph John Chauncey Fisher was born 9 May 1897 in Washington, D.C., to the Reverend John W. and Glendora Williamson Fisher. Fisher was the youngest of three children, with an older brother, Joseph, and an older sister, Pearl. In 1903 the family moved to New York, but by 1905 they had resettled in Providence, Rhode Island. Rudolph Fisher attended public schools in Providence and graduated from Classical High School with high honors. By the end of senior year, his interest in both literature and science was established. This was evident throughout his undergraduate career at Brown University (1915–1919). He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and other honorary societies; he won prizes for performances in his German classes, for public speaking, and for his work in rhetoric and English composition. During his senior year he was elected a commencement-day speaker, and using as his subject the emancipation of science, Fisher attempted to argue for the compatibility of science and religion. In two stories published late in his career, “John Archer's Nose” and “The Conjure Man Dies”, he would dramatize if not their compatibility, at least their resigned coexistence. Fisher received an MA in biology at Brown in 1920 and entered Howard Medical School that fall. By the time he finished medical school, Fisher had started at least four short stories, all of which would eventually be published. His first and still one of his most popular, “The City of Refuge”, was submitted to Atlantic Monthly during the spring of his senior year; it was published the following year. Fisher graduated with highest honors from medical school in 1924, interned for a year at Freedman's Hospital, and won a research fellowship, which supported him from September 1925 to October 1927. In 1926 his lengthy story “High Yaller” won the Amy Spingarn Prize for fiction. In just a few short years, Rudolph Fisher had distinguished himself in the study of medicine and in the writing of short fiction.

While his fiction writing continued steadily, Fisher set up practice as a roentgenologist, working at various New York City hospitals before moving into private practice at his home in Jamaica, Long Island. He was among the few who practiced in the new field of X-ray technology and among the very few African Americans who practiced the specialty between 1920 and 1940.

By 1924 Fisher had met Jane Ryder, a lively and intelligent grade-school teacher in Washington. They married within a year and a half of meeting, and by 1926 a son, Hugh, was born. Fisher promptly and jokingly nicknamed him “the New Negro,” the popular term that characterized the pride and assertiveness of many during this period.

Music was always vitally important to Rudolph Fisher and his work. By 1919 he had met and befriended Paul Robeson, then a student at Rutgers. With Paul singing and Rudolph playing the piano and arranging, they toured the East Coast, hoping to raise money for tuition. Later, while a research fellow, Fisher helped shape some of the skits for a musical revue that was to star Robeson. An avid fan of jazz, “Bud” Fisher, with his wife and friends, often visited Harlem cabarets, speakeasies, and nightclubs. His observations on racially integrated audiences in Harlem and the rage for jazz are wryly presented in his essay “The Caucasian Storms Harlem”. In his fiction he was always sensitive to the use of music as more than backdrop or narcotic. He experimented with interesting ways to make the music an essential ingredient in the story. There are fine examples of this in “Common Meter” and “Miss Cynthie” and in the long masquerade ball scene in The Walls of Jericho (1928).

In March, October, and December 1934, Fisher underwent surgeries for a stomach disorder. He died on 26 December 1934 at Edgecombe Sanitarium in New York City. A first lieutenant in the reserve medical corps of the 369th Infantry, Fisher was buried three days later with members of the detachment in attendance.

Fisher's bright, open, comic sense encouraged the development of a Black literary voice that did not avoid the ambiguities and contradictions within the urban community. Whether applied to the specific genre of the mystery story or to literary fiction, his accounts of a group attempting to achieve community were perceptive and helped to deeply enrich as well as suggest fresh directions for a literature entering its modern period.

Bibliography

• Arthur Davis, From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers (1900–1960), 1974.
• Robert Bone, Down Home: A History of Afro-American Short Fiction from Its Beginnings to the End of the Harlem Renaissance, 1975.
• Bruce Kellner, Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary for the Era, 1987.
• John McCluskey, Jr., City of Refuge: Collected Stories of Rudolph Fisher, 1987.
• Charles Heglar, “Rudolph Fisher and the African American Detective,” in Armchair Detective 30 (1997): 300–05

John McCluskey, Jr.

For more information on Rudolph John Chauncey Fisher, visit Britannica.com.

• Born: May 9, 1897
• Birthplace: Washington, DC
• Died: December 26, 1934

Novelist and short-story writer Rudolph Fisher graduated from Howard University Medical School in 1924, becoming a roentgenologist. He had received his BA and MA from Brown University, where he had majored in English and Biology.

Fisher wrote two acclaimed novels in his life. In the first, The Walls of Jericho, he presents a cross section of black life in Harlem. In Conjure-Man Dies, he created the first black detective story. Fisher's short stories were compiled in an edition called City of Refuge: The Collected Stories of Rudolph Fisher, in 1991. The title for this collection of short stories was taken from the name of Fisher’s first short story, “The City of Refuge,” which was published in Atlantic Monthly in 1925.

Fisher was also an accomplished musician who arranged many Negro spirituals, and was responsible for arranging the music for Paul Robeson's first concert in New York.

Most Famous Works

• The Walls of Jericho (1928)
• The Conjure-Man Dies (1932)

writer; medical practitioner

Personal Information

Born Rudolph John Chauncey Fisher, May 9, 1897, in Washington D.C.; son of John Wesley Fisher (Reverend) and Glendora Fisher; married Jane Ryder, 1926; children: Hugh.
Education: Brown University B.A.; Brown M.A., 1919; Howard Medical School degree, 1924.

Career

Writer and medical practitioner. Around 1924 became a fellow at the National Research Council at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons; first short story published in Atlantic Monthly, 1925; two years later, opened medical practice in Harlem and had stories published in American Mercury and Atlantic Monthly; in 1928 first novel published by Alfred A. Knopf; second book published in 1932 by Convici and Freide; last story published in Story Magazine, 1933.

Life's Work

Considered one of the most talented short-story writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Rudolph Fisher revealed, through his fictional satirical style, the diverse elements of the African American community. During the mid-1920s, Fisher balanced his professional life between a successful medical practice and a writing career which brought him acclaim for several short stories, a play, and two novels, The Walls Of Jericho (1928) and The Conjure Man Dies (1932). While the former work emerged as one the first black novels to address the issue of class antagonism among black Harlemites, the latter is credited as the second detective crime novel written by an African American. Throughout his short-lived career Fisher balanced his writing between the speech and mannerisms of wealthy African American New Yorkers with the common speech, or what he termed "Harlemese," the rhythmic and idiosyncratic dialogue of 1920s black Harlem. A writer of considerable talent, his work continues to appear in African American literary volumes and collected studies of the Harlem Renaissance.

Following his birth in Washington D.C. on May 9, 1897, Rudolph John Chauncey Fisher was raised by his parents--Reverend John Wesley Fisher and Glendora Fisher--in Providence, Rhode Island. Graduating with honors from Providence's Classical High School in 1915 Fisher entered Brown University. Affectionately known by fellow students as "Bud"--a nickname derived from the famous cartoon-creator of "Mutt and Jeff"--Fisher became an award-winning scholar and orator. After earning a B.A., he graduated from Brown with an M.A. and Beta Kappa key in 1919.

On July 16, 1919, Fisher took part in a Manhattan-based program entitled "Four Negro Commencement Speakers" where he read his Brown commencement speech, "The Emancipation of Science." The program also included a Rutgers University student, the future lawyer, famed vocalist, and political activist Paul Robeson. "There was warm sincerity in the congratulations the two honor graduates exchanged that evening--Paul, the future lawyer, and Bud the physician-to-be," wrote Loyd L. Brown in The Young Paul Robeson: On My Own Journey. "And later, when they kept their promises to keep in touch, they would discover they would have much more in common than their ability to prove in school the 'efficiency of the Race.'"

Fisher then attended Howard University Medical School and studied roentgenology (the diagnostic and therapeutic uses of X-rays). During his senior year at Howard University's medical school, Fisher served an internship at Freedman's Hope Hospital in Washington D.C., and wrote his first short story, "City of Refuge." He graduated from Howard University with honors in 1924, and subsequently became a fellow at the National Research Council at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he studied bacteriology with Dr. Frederick P. Gray.

During the mid 1920s Fisher became associated with Harlem's black Bohemian circle led by writers Wallace Thurman and Zora Neale Hurston. Fisher quickly gained a reputation as an individual of gifted wit and literary talent. "He was immensely liked by both men and women," explained David Levering Lewis in When Harlem Was in Vogue, "not only because he was handsome but because he kept his exceptionally sharp mind from pricking people unnecessarily. Literary teas and 'book talk' bored Fisher. Like that of Langston Hughes, with whom he was causally friendly, Fisher's anguish over the race problem fell short of desperation because of personal resiliency and a discerning optimism."

Fisher's first story "City of Refuge" appeared in a February 1925 edition of the Atlantic Monthly. Through its main character, Solomon, Fisher's story revealed the initial optimism and the harsh realities awaiting newly arrived migrants in Harlem, a community he called "city of Satan." In 1925 "City of Refuge" appeared in the compendium work The New Negro. That same year, he also received The Crisis Spingarn Prize for his short story "High Yaller," which revealed the interracial prejudice in the relationships between light complexioned blacks--"High Yallers"--and darker-skinned members of the race. Based on the courtship of a light-skinned black woman, Evelyn Brown--who appears white--and her dark- complexioned suitor, Jay Martin, the story delved into a perceived miscegenational relationship which brought harsh reactions from both the black and white communities. Rather than be mistaken for an interracial couple, and to avoid the legal and social consequences associated with such a relationship, Evelyn and Jay end their short-lived courtship--each retreating to their expected places in Harlem society. Like many of Fisher's other work, "High Yaller" dealt not only with racial relations between blacks and whites, it also concentrated on the subject of color prejudice within the African American community.

In 1927 Fisher opened a private medical practice in Harlem 1927 and around this time became the administrator of a private X-ray laboratory, and a chair on the Department of Roentgenology at Manhattan's International Hospital. Once established in Harlem, Fisher discovered that many of his favorite local African American night spots had been transformed into venues catering primarily to white customers. His criticism and parody of these trends surfaced in the piece "The Caucasian Storms Harlem," published in an August 1927 edition of American Mercury. In the piece Fisher also lamented the "Negro Invasion of Broadway"--the vogue of African American stage productions which followed in the success of Flourney Miller's and Aubrey Lyle's 1921 landmark hit show "Shuffle Along." Fisher's other stories appeared in McClure's, Survey Graphic, Redbook, and Story Magazine, as well as scientific publications such as Journal of Infectious Diseases, Proceedings of the Society of Experimental Biology, and Medicine. August of 1927 also saw the publication of Fisher's short story "Blades of Steel" in the Atlantic Monthly. In this work Fisher described the antagonistic relationship between a razor-toting Harlem hustler--light complexioned Dirty Couzens--and Eight-Ball Eddy Boyd. After accusing Boyd of cheating him out of money at a card game, Couzens encounters his adversary at an annual barber's ball. Despite his reputation with a blade, Couzens receives a facial wound from Boyd's razor which leads him to flee the ball and to wear the humiliating scar of his defeat.

Through the intercession of NAACP executive secretary Walter White and novelist Carl Van Vechten, Fisher's novel Walls of Jericho was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1928. Though a worthy effort by a first-time author, the book was condemned by W.E.B. Du Bois for portraying the upper class blacks as snobbish and lacking in values. In The Crisis Du Bois' review of the novel admonished, "Why does Mr. Fisher fear to use his genius to paint his own kind ... the glimpses of the better classes of Negroes which he gives us are poor, ineffective make-believes." Despite Du Bois' condemnation of Fisher's work, historian Nathan Huggins noted in Harlem Renaissance, that the work emerged as "the only novel in the decade that exposed class antagonism among Harlem blacks." The novel's protagonist-hipster, Joshua "Shine" Jones, earns his living as piano mover who despises middle and upper-class blacks--people he condemned as affecting the superficial mannerisms of white society. In The Portable Renaissance Reader, David Levering Lewis lauded Fisher's work as "a social novel with an upbeat ending in which the best elements of Harlem's upper crust ('dicties') eventually collaborate with men and women ('rats') normally unwelcome in Talented Tenth salons, in order to combat organized crime, drugs, and other demoralizing forces within the community."

Fisher wrote his short story "Common Meter" in 1930, a work which saw publication in The Baltimore African-American. In "Common Meter" two competitive orchestra leaders--Fessenden "Fess" Baxter and Bus Williams--engage in a battle-of-the-bands contest in an effort to win the affection of a beautiful young black woman. Within the narrative, Fisher explores the aspects of the orchestrated jazz style and the spiritual power of the blues. Fess Baxter's creative musical arrangements, and his deceitful attempts to win the contest, are eventually thwarted by Bus Williams, who wins the contest with a heart-felt low-down blues number.

In 1932 Fisher's book Conjure Man Dies saw publication by Convici- Friede, making him the second African American to publish a detective novel in the United States. Fisher utilized his medical background to write a mystery involving a cast of Harlem characters. As David Levering Lewis noted in When Harlem was in Vogue, "Fisher's technique owed something to the master of thrillers, S.S. Divine, but the interest of the Conjure Man is largely its Harlem setting and its overworking of Amos 'n' Andy dialogue to play to white (and secretly, black) readers." "Like the Walls of Jericho...," wrote Bernard W. Bell, in The African American Novel and Its Tradition, "The Conjure Man Dies reflects Fisher's ambivalence about the black bourgeoisie and his wry vision of the capacity of black Americans to laugh at life and themselves as the key to survival and the triumph of their humanity. The celebration of black humor and experimentation with it in the detective novel are Fisher's major contributions to the tradition of the Afro-American novel."

Fisher's last published work, "Miss Cynthie," appeared in Story Magazine in 1933. A well-conceived short story, the story is about a Southern migrant grandmother, Miss Cynthie, who arrives in Harlem to meet her successful grandson. A hard-working and religious woman, Miss Cynthie raised the young man in the South, and had expected her grandson to have established himself as a member of the black professional class. To her surprise his economic advancement emerged as an entertainer in the theater--a place she views as a haven for sin and immoral characters. "Although the seventy-year-old woman finds it difficult to accept the role of the boy whom she had always thought of as a doctor, a dentist, or, as she reminds herself rather whimsically, at least an undertaker," wrote James A. Emanuel and Theodore L. Gross in Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, "she comes to realize that he has developed organically and honestly, on his own terms. The boy's terms are those of the old woman, too, for she had first sung to him; she had first given him her joy and her own love of music. Without imposing his ideas on the reader, Fisher has contrasted ironically two generations of Negroes as they function in two different areas of the country."

In the early 1930s, during the waning days of the Harlem Renaissance, Fisher fell ill. After several operations, he died of intestinal cancer (a condition said to be caused by his unprotected use of X-ray equipment) in New York City on December 26, 1934. After his death Conjure Man Dies was produced as a folk play at Harlem's Lafayette Theatre in 1936. Over the following decades Fisher's short works have appeared in several anthologies and collections, including The Negro Caravan: Writings By American Negroes (1941), American Negro Short Stories (1966), Black Voices, An Anthology of African American Literature (1968), Black Literature in America (1971), Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (1976), and The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997).

As a member of the black bourgeoisie Fisher sought inspiration from the rich strata of Harlem black society--from the working class hustlers, big band leaders, West Indians, and preachers, to "dicty" real estate men. "His heroes," observed S.P. Fullinwider in The Mind and Mood of Black America, "were usually done in by his villains because he felt that the city slicker, the con-man, was being created by a new environment, and it made him sad. Fisher, who won honors all the way through high school, was isolated from the black masses of the ghetto, whom he liked and tried to understand, as he was from the white man, whom he hated." Fisher's fiction was filled with the tensions and struggles of race and class, revealing what David Levering Lewis described in When Harlem was in Vogue, as "the cleavages within the Afro-American world." In his 1926 essay "The Artist and The Racial Mountain," as quoted in The New Negro, Langston Hughes captured the most important element of Fisher's work: "Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voices of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate closed ears of the colored-near intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand. Let Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem ... cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimpse of their own beauty."

Awards

Brown University Class Day Orator; Brown Beta Kappa Key 1919; Brown University commencement speaker; received honors from Howard Medical School; The Crisis Spingarn Prize, 1925.

Works

Books

• The Walls of Jericho, Alfred A. Knopf, 1928, reprinted by Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1994.
• The Conjure Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem, Convici- Freide, 1932.

• "City of Refuge," 1925.
• "High Yaller," 1926.
• "Blades of Steel," 1927.
• "Ringtail."
• "The South Still Lingers On."
• "Fire By Night."
• "The Promiseland."
• "Common Meter," 1930.
• "Miss Cynthie," 1933.

• "The Caucasian Storms Harlem," 1927.

Further Reading

Books

• Bell, Bernard W., The African American Novel and its Tradition, University of Massachusetts Press, 1987, pp. 138-142.
• Brown, Loyd L., The Young Paul Robeson: On My Own Journey Now, Westview Press, 1977, pp. 103-104.
• Cavalcade: Negro Writing From 1760 to the Present, edited by Arthur P. Davis and Saunders Redding, Houghton Mifflin, 1971, pp. 337-353.
• Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, edited by James A.
• Emanuel and Theodore L. Gross, pp. 110-123.
• Fullinwider, S.P., The Mind and Mood of Black America, The Dorsey Press, 1969, pp. 161-162.
• Huggins, Nathan Irvin, Harlem Renaissance, Oxford University Press, 1971, pp. 118-121.
• Lewis, David Levering, When Harlem Was in Vogue, pp. 229-230.
• The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke, Albert and Charles Boni, 1925, pp. 692-694.
• The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, edited by David Levering Lewis, pp. 110-117.
• Voices From the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Nathan Irvin Huggins, Oxford University Press, 1976, pp. 74-82.

• The Crisis, November 1928.

— John Cohassey

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