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
Tamlyn Avery
Contributions
Playing Amanuensis to Inner Urges: Masculinity, Authorial Anxiety, and Wallace Thurman’s Typewriter
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). 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.”