Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance

MISS ANNE IN HARLEM is the first book to tell the story of the small band of white women--many of whom hailed from New York's highest social echelons, many of them Jewish--who became patrons of and romantic participants in the Harlem Renaissance.

Part group biography, part cultural history, part detective story, this book unravels the mystery of who these women were and why they crossed the most taboo racial boundaries of the age.

At the heart of this book is Carla Kaplan's desire to understand what drove these women to defy the expectations of their families and the strict social world in which they lived to support, both financially and emotionally, black artists and writers.

As one of the few white women in black studies today, and an authority in related fields such as women's history, modernism and the Twenties, Carla Kaplan is well poised to venture into this rich and controversial territory, bringing the story of Miss Anne to light for the first time.