Walls of Jericho

Rudolph Fisher was a true Renaissance man-a doctor, orator, music arranger, and writer. He graduated from Brown University with a dual major in biology and English, and graduated from Howard University Medical School. He moved to New York in 1926 and became part of the Harlem Renaissance; Langston Hughes called him "the wittiest of these New Negroes of Harlem." His story, "City of Refuge," was published in The Atlantic, and his novel The Conjure Man Dies (1932) is considered to be the first known crime novel written by an African American. The Walls of Jericho, his first novel, is a satire of Jazz-Age Harlem, highlighting the racial and class divides of the day. Fisher died in 1934 at the age of 37.