New York Fiction
Markku Salmela, L. Ameel
2016
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Key Takeaway Key Takeaway: The City of Refuge, a Harlem Renaissance short story, serves as a point of departure for exploring the impact of race, class, and urban experience on New York City literature.
Abstract
The approach to the literature of New York outlined in this chapter finds a pertinent point of departure in an emblematic Harlem Renaissance text. Rudolph Fisher’s short story The City of Refuge (1925) opens with King Solomon Gillis “dazed and blinking” on a Harlem street. He has just arrived in New York City from North Carolina and experienced his first subway ride, which felt “as if he had been caught up in the jaws of a steam-shovel, jammed together with other helpless lumps of dirt, swept blindly along for a time, and at last abruptly dumped” (Fisher 2008: 35).
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