The Walls of Jericho

Said by Langston Hughes to be the "wittiest of these New Negroes of Harlem," Rudolph Fisher (1897-1934) was a Black physician, novelist, musician and orator. Born in Washington D. C. , Fisher had shown himself to be studious from a young age. He graduated from high school with honors at the age of eighteen and immediately pursued higher education at Brown University. Within ten years, Fisher would obtain a bachelor and master of the arts from Brown and take up his medical studies at Howard University. Not one to be singularly focused, Fisher would entertain all three of his interests-medicine, writing and jazz-during his college years and upon graduation built a steady career in the medical field as a radiologist while using his medical experiences as inspiration for his mystery novel. Fisher would also compose musical scores and spent the first summer after college touring the East Coast in a two-man band. Much like his contemporaries Wallace Thurman and Langston Hughes, Fisher would be moved to write about Black life as it was and not as it was idealized to be, with his first novel, The Walls of Jericho (1928), exploring themes of colorism, intra-community prejudice, and class inequality. He would make literary history just four years later with the publication of his mystery novel, The Conjure Man Dies (1932). Set in Harlem, the novel was one of the first mystery stories published by a Black author (preceded by Pauline E. Hopkins with her short story "Talma Gordon" in 1900, the second novel to have a Black detective (preceded by John Edward Bruce's The Black Sleuth) and the first mystery novel to be written by a Black author, feature a Black detective and have all Black characters. During the course of his literary career, he would also produce several short stories in 1925 and an influential essay, "The Caucasian Storms Harlem" (1927). Fisher died at the unfortunate age of thirty-seven in New York City, leaving behind his wife, Jane Ryder, and their son, Hugh "The New Negro" Fisher.