Spanning the 1920's to the mid-1930's, the Harlem Renaissance was a literary, artistic, and intellectual movement that kindled a new black cultural identity. It's essence was summed up by critic and teacher Alain Locke when he declared in 1926, that through art, "Negro life is seizing its first chances for group expression and self determination." Harlem became the center of a "spiritual coming of age," in which Locke's, "new Negro" transformed social disillusionment to race pride." Chiefly literary, the Renaissance included the visual arts, but excluded jazz, despite its parallel emergence as a black art form. Jazz grew out of the era's ragtime music, and it's influence was not restricted to the musical arena. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald labeled the period from the end of the Great War to the Great Depression as the Jazz Age, for the cultural change it brought about as the music that defined it. While much of the country found solace in the policies associated with Prohibition, Fitzgerald chronicled the hedonism found during the Jazz Age in many of his works, including The Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tales from the Jazz Age. Speakeasies and nightclubs abounded in urban areas as Prohibition was routinely circumvented, or ignored outright. Bigotry in American society remained a formidable obstacle, but jazz music and the culture it produced, offered Americans an unprecedented opportunity to interact with one another regardless of race. White patrons routinely frequented jazz clubs to listen to African American performers like Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and Duke Ellington. The art produced at this time varied greatly in theme. It ranged from the depiction of grandiose urban lifestyles to mundane rural landscapes. From the frivolous daily motions of individuals to the all-encompassing, and weighty themes of slavery and cultural origins in Africa. A notable central theme is the depiction, and reinterpretation of