Negro
London: Nancy Cunard at Wishart & Co.
First edition. (12 in x 10 in). 855 pages. Rebound, with the original back and front covers preserved in the rebind. Internal pages remain clean and complete, including the fold out map. Almost 200 entries from 150 contributors and close to 400 illustrations.
This monumental work was personally financed and overseen by Nancy Cunard—writer, activist, and heiress of the Cunard shipping fortune. She commissioned only 1,000 copies, but a significant portion of the edition was destroyed in the Blitz during the Second World War, when the warehouse in which they were stored was struck and burned.
The book occupies a unique place in twentieth-century literary and cultural history. Cunard was a central figure in the transatlantic avant-garde, moving in the same circles as Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and Ernest Hemingway. Her publishing ventures in the 1930s reflected not only her devotion to modernist literature but also her passionate commitment to social and political causes, from anti-fascism to civil rights.
A major feature of the book is its inclusion of leading African American writers whose work was rarely given such prominence at the time. Contributors included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Claude McKay, among others—figures central to the Harlem Renaissance and the broader expansion of Black intellectual and artistic life in the early twentieth century. By giving their poetry, fiction, and essays a place alongside European and American modernists, Cunard created a transatlantic bridge that both celebrated and preserved a vital cultural movement.
Because of the limited print run, compounded by wartime destruction, very few copies have survived. Case 1. Very Good. Item #143
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