Half High

Richard Bruce Nugent

Oct 2023 · The Multicanon Media Company, LLC

About this ebook

Published here for the first time is Bruce Nugent's short novel, Half High, a story about a mysterious young artist named Aeon, whose mixed racial heritage alienates him from both the Black and white worlds of 1920s New York and beyond.

A stand-alone novella that nonetheless further engages with the characters in Nugent's full-length novel Gentleman Jigger, this important work deepens our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance, Black modernism, and Black modernism's relationship to the modernist work white authors were producing at the time as well. Presented here with a short introduction by Whit Frazier, including a brief discussion of how this work came to be published.

About the author

Richard Bruce Nugent is a luminary who is known for his association with the Harlem Renaissance, as well as for his revolutionary queering of Black literature at a time when that was completely unprecedented. Nugent is not as well known as some of his friends and companions from the Harlem Renaissance, but he wrote the novel Gentleman Jigger, which was published in a fragmented form in 2008; and he also wrote many shorter pieces, made countless drawings and paintings, and still has unpublished material waiting to be discovered.