Autobiographical Statement
1928
My parents and grandparents were pioneer Westerners who settled finally in Salt Lake City, Utah, thus enabling me to be born, twenty-six years ago, within the protective shadows of the Mormon Temple and the Wasatch Mountains.
I first entered school at the age of six in the city of Boise, Idaho. Within two months, I was taken ill and for the next two years was a pampered invalid. Meanwhile I had returned to the city of my nativity only to leave there after another two years to move to Chicago where I remained from 1910 until 1914. Omaha, Nebraska was my next stopping off place. It was there that I finished grammar school and was a high school freshman. This done I once more went back to Salt Lake. Persistent heart attacks made a lower altitude necessary so off I went to spend a winter in Pasadena, California. Came the “flu” epidemic of 1918, I succumbed and on convalescing returned to my hometown. Somehow or other by this time I had finished high school and had matriculated at the University of Utah. Two years there, a pre med student, then a nervous breakdown, a summer trip to Omaha, a “hobo” trip back to Salt Lake. Then Los Angeles again, three years a postal clerk, two simultaneous years a student at the University of Southern California, sudden inspiration, decision to be a writer, and in 1925 a hectic hegira to Harlem.
Thus is my checkerboard past. Three years in Harlem have seen me before a New Negro (for no reason at all and without my consent), a post (having had two poems published by generous editors), an editor (with a penchant for financially unsound publications), a critic (see articles on Negro life and literature in The Bookman, New Republic, Independent, World Tomorrow, etc.), an actor (I was a denizen of Cat Fish Row in Porgy), a husband (having been married all of six months), a novelist (e.g., The Blacker the Berry, Macaulay’s, February 1, 1929; $2.50), a playwright (being co author of Black Belt). Now what more could one do?
http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Writings-Wallace-Thurman-Renaissance/dp/0813533015/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196801109&sr=1-1
1928
My parents and grandparents were pioneer Westerners who settled finally in Salt Lake City, Utah, thus enabling me to be born, twenty-six years ago, within the protective shadows of the Mormon Temple and the Wasatch Mountains.
I first entered school at the age of six in the city of Boise, Idaho. Within two months, I was taken ill and for the next two years was a pampered invalid. Meanwhile I had returned to the city of my nativity only to leave there after another two years to move to Chicago where I remained from 1910 until 1914. Omaha, Nebraska was my next stopping off place. It was there that I finished grammar school and was a high school freshman. This done I once more went back to Salt Lake. Persistent heart attacks made a lower altitude necessary so off I went to spend a winter in Pasadena, California. Came the “flu” epidemic of 1918, I succumbed and on convalescing returned to my hometown. Somehow or other by this time I had finished high school and had matriculated at the University of Utah. Two years there, a pre med student, then a nervous breakdown, a summer trip to Omaha, a “hobo” trip back to Salt Lake. Then Los Angeles again, three years a postal clerk, two simultaneous years a student at the University of Southern California, sudden inspiration, decision to be a writer, and in 1925 a hectic hegira to Harlem.
Thus is my checkerboard past. Three years in Harlem have seen me before a New Negro (for no reason at all and without my consent), a post (having had two poems published by generous editors), an editor (with a penchant for financially unsound publications), a critic (see articles on Negro life and literature in The Bookman, New Republic, Independent, World Tomorrow, etc.), an actor (I was a denizen of Cat Fish Row in Porgy), a husband (having been married all of six months), a novelist (e.g., The Blacker the Berry, Macaulay’s, February 1, 1929; $2.50), a playwright (being co author of Black Belt). Now what more could one do?
http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Writings-Wallace-Thurman-Renaissance/dp/0813533015/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196801109&sr=1-1
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