Tamlyn Avery

Bio

Dr. Tamlyn Avery is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Adelaide. She is author of The Regional Development of the American Bildungsroman, 1900–1960 (Edinburgh, 2023) and co-editor of Revisiting the Poetics and Politics of Modernism: The Women of 1922 (Palgrave, 2025, forthcoming). Her next book, Writing the Collar-Line, traces the Black typewriter throughout African American literary history

Contributions

Playing Amanuensis to Inner Urges: Masculinity, Authorial Anxiety, and Wallace Thurman’s Typewriter

Peer Reviewed

Print Plus Exclusive

© 2025 Johns Hopkins University Press When Wallace Thurman announced his engagement to Louise Thompson in 1928, after just two months of courtship, tongues wagged: Harlem’s audacious “young upstart” was to marry the typewriter of his forthcoming novel, The Blacker the Berry (1929). [1] Alain Locke—the self-appointed “mid-wife” of America’s New Negro Renaissance, which Thurman represented—immediately wrote to tell Thompson “how much I envy any man who has you for both a wife and secretary.” [2]...

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Harlem Renaissance print culture