Wintz, Cary D. 1943-

PERSONAL:

Born February 12, 1943, in Houston, TX; son of E. Cary (a lumber broker) and Madge Sturgis Wintz; married Ellen Carolyn Ireton, April 10, 1965 (divorced, 1972); married Celia Janet Boritz (professor and consultant), August 9, 1974; children: Jason Michael. Education: Rice University, B.A., 1965; Kansas State University, M.A., 1968, Ph.D., 1974. Politics: Independent. Religion: "Independent."

ADDRESSES:

Home—Houston, TX. Office—Department of History and Geography, Texas Southern University, 3100 Cleburne St., Houston, TX 77004.

CAREER:

Texas Southern University, Houston, TX, instructor, 1971-74, assistant professor, 1974-77, associate professor, beginning in 1977, became professor of history and chair of the department of history, geography, and economics, 1995-2001. Information Service, lecturer on race and ethnicity in the Philippines, 1986, and India, 1990. Houston Center for the Humanities, president; Southwest Social Science Association (general program chair, 1990-94, vice president, 1994, president, 1996); film consultant for This Is Our Home, It's Not for Sale.

MEMBER:

American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, Southern Historical Association, Southwestern Historical Association (president), Texas State Historical Association.

WRITINGS:

Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance, Rice University Press (Houston, TX), 1987.

(Editor, with Howard Booth) Black Dixie: Essays on Afro-Texan History and Culture in Houston ("Centennial" series of the Association of Former Students), Texas A&M University Press (College Station, TX), 1992.

(Editor) African American Political Thought, 1890-1930: Washington, Du Bois, Garvey, and Randolph, M.E. Sharpe (Armonk, NY), 1996.

The Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940, Volume 1: The Emergence of the Harlem Renaissance, Volume 2: The Politics and Aesthetics of "New Negro" Literature, Volume 3: Black Writers Interpret the Harlem Renaissance, Volume 4: The Critics and the Harlem Renaissance, Volume 5: Remembering the Harlem Renaissance, Volume 6: Analysis and Assessment, 1940-1979, Volume 7: Analysis and Assessment, 1980-1994, Garland (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor) Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, M.E. Sharpe (Armonk, NY), 2001.

(With Adrian Anderson) Texas: The Lone Star State, 8th edition, Prentice Hall (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2001, 9th edition, 2005.

(Editor, with Sam Haynes) Major Problems in Texas History, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2002.

(Editor, with Paul Finkelman) Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, two volumes, Routledge (New York, NY), 2004.

Harlem Speaks: A Living History of the Harlem Renaissance, Sourcebooks (Naperville, IL), 2006.

Contributor of articles and reviews to history journals.

SIDELIGHTS:

Cary D. Wintz is a professor of history whose seven-volume work, The Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940, is a history of the authors and poets of the time who wrote about the issues important to the black community. Wintz's emphasis is on the literature and on source materials. African American Review contributor Angelyn Mitchell described the three types of published and unpublished writings as "critical and interpretive materials by Harlem Renaissance writers and their peers, retrospective examinations through the eyes of the participants and their contemporaries as well as the writers and critics of post-Renaissance literature, and scholarly analyses of the movement from the 1940s through the early 1990s." Mitchell reviewed volume four, The Critics and the Harlem Renaissance, saying that it falls under the first category. She described it as "a useful and needed compilation of primary source materials such as essays and editorials, interviews and letters."

Essayists include Charles Chesnutt, Alain Locke, Walter White, Wallace Thurman, Benjamin Brawley, V.F. Calverton, and William Stanley Braithwaite. Reviewers of literary works include Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison on Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois on Nella Larsen and Claude McKay, Carl Van Vechten on Countee Cullen and James Weldon Johnson, and Gwendolyn Bennett on Jessie Fauset and Claude McKay. Also included are Locke's surveys published in Opportunity from 1929 to 1939, excluding 1930, in which he wrote about economics, sociology, education, anthropology, and history, as they related to black interests. Mitchell called the volume "a treasure trove … and a wonderful resource."

Remembering the Harlem Renaissance, volume five in the series, was reviewed by A. Yemisi Jimoh, in African American Review, who wrote that Wintz "acknowledges … that any attempt to circumscribe the boundaries of the Harlem Renaissance is difficult." Jimoh noted that Wintz includes excerpts from Benjamin Brawley's The Negro Genius (1937), and Sterling Brown's The Negro in American Fiction (1937) and Negro Poetry and Drama (1937), as well as individual essays and essays from important anthologies. "Wintz's selection of texts from his primary sources are well-chosen," remarked Jimoh.

African American Review contributor George Hutchinson reviewed volume six, Analysis and Assessment, 1940-1979, and volume seven, Analysis and Assessment, 1980-1994. In these final volumes, Wintz groups the contents by subject matter, and Hutchinson noted that "the collection holds discoveries, I dare say, for even the most seasoned Harlem Renaissance aficionados; but perhaps its chief value will be for those with little access to the journals in which most of the criticism first appeared." Hutchinson described as "lucid [and] groundbreaking" the essays in volume six by Abraham Chapman, Arthur P. Davis, Nathan Huggins, Blyden Jackson, August Meier, Saunders Redding, and Charles I. Glicksberg, saying that they give "a sense of shifting historical perspectives through the rise and fall of ‘integrationist’ criticism."

Volume seven includes essays by Arnold Rampersad, Gerald Early, Houston Baker, Cheryl Wall, Sharon Dean, and Erlene Stetson, as well as by lesser-known writers. Hutchinson noted that this volume, on criticism post-1980, "has a more academic flavor, reflecting the changing institutional status of African American literature." Hutchinson concluded by saying that "perhaps the most striking aspect of these volumes is their simple existence, a sign of the current explosion of interest in the Harlem Renaissance, which has been signaled by major conferences in the U.K., France, and the U.S. [in the late 1990s], and the choice of Cane as a required text for the French universities' aggregation in English." In an overall appraisal of the seven volumes, an African American Review writer wrote that the collection "performs an important service by reprinting a full range of materials on a crucial period in African American culture."

The two-volume Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, which Wintz coedited with Paul Finkelman, includes 639 entries that explore the historic, political, and social contexts in which the Harlem Renaissance developed, and that provide detailed discussion about individual figures, artworks, organizations, places, and larger issues such as the impact of the Harlem Renaissance on Europe. Noting the book's useful organization and accessible prose, Booklist contributor Michael Tosko observed that entries on sensitive subjects such as lynching or "passing" were particularly commendable. The encyclopedia, he concluded, is a "significant and useful addition to reference works on the Harlem Renaissance."

Harlem Speaks: A Living History of the Harlem Renaissance, a one-volume reference with audio CD-ROM, received similar critical respect. Wintz collects twenty-one biographical essays by leading scholars on such figures as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Josephine Baker, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Countee Cullen, Duke Ellington, and others. As Joyce Adams Burner noted in School Library Journal, the writing is "consistently clear and engaging" and is enhanced by well-chosen audio material including music, readings from literature, interviews, and excerpts from radio programs. Booklist reviewer Vanessa Bush appreciated the historical context that Wintz provides in this work, calling Harlem Speaks a "fabulous resource."

Wintz once told CA: "W.E.B. Du Bois may have underspoken [long] … ago when he prophesied that the ‘color line’ would be the issue of the twentieth century. Today, race and ethnicity are the strongest, and perhaps the most destructive, forces in the world. Although I never planned it this way or made any conscious decision to bring it about, race has been the central element in my life and work. In confronting this, I have always tried to treat it matter-of-factly: to recognize it, deal with it, and transcend it. Overcoming the ‘race issue’ is mankind's greatest challenge: success will free us, failure will be our undoing."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

African American Review, fall, 1998, Angelyn Mitchell, review of The Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940, Volume 4: The Critics and the Harlem Renaissance, p. 495; fall, 1999, A. Yemisi Jimoh, review of The Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940, Volume 5: Remembering the Harlem Renaissance, p. 526, George Hutchinson, review of The Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940, Volume 6: Analysis and Assessment, 1940-1979, and Volume 7: Analysis and Assessment, 1980-1994, p. 529; winter, 1999, review of The Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940, Volume 3: Black Writers Interpret the Harlem Renaissance, p. 697; spring, 2000, review of The Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940, p. 184.

American Historical Review, December, 1990, Nathan Irvin Huggins, review of Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance, p. 1646.

American Literature, March, 1990, Keith E. Byerman, review of Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance, p. 143.

Booklist, December 15, 2004, Michael Tosko, review of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, p. 757; February 1, 2007, Vanessa Bush, review of Harlem Speaks: A Living History of the Harlem Renaissance, p. 28.

Choice, July, 1996, R.J. Lettieri, review of African American Political Thought, 1890-1930: Washington, Du Bois, Garvey, and Randolph, p. 1855; January, 1993, S. Cresswell, review of Black Dixie: Essays on Afro-Texan History and Culture in Houston, p. 867; March, 2005, A.C. Vara, review of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, p. 1194; July, 2007, C.A. Bily, review of Harlem Speaks, p. 1913.

College English, November, 1990, Ken Kirkpatrick, review of Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance, p. 812.

Journal of American History, September, 1993, Alwyn Barr, review of Black Dixie, p. 673.

Journal of Southern History, November, 1993, Ralph A. Wooster, review of Black Dixie, p. 796; May, 1997, Judith Stein, review of African American PoliticalThought, 1890-1930, p. 427; August, 1990, Leslie Sanders, review of Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance, p. 554; November, 1993, Ralph A. Wooster, review of Black Dixie, p. 796; May, 1997, Judith Stein, review of African American Political Thought, 1890-1930, p. 427.

Journal of Urban History, May, 1995, Christopher E. Linsin, review of Black Dixie, p. 527.

Mississippi Quarterly, winter, 1993, Joseph A. Tomberlin, review of Black Dixie.

Publishers Weekly, September 16, 1988, review of Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance, p. 74.

Reference & Research Book News, February, 1997, review of Black Writers Interpret the Harlem Renaissance, review of The Emergence of the Harlem Renaissance, and review of The Politics and Aesthetics of "New Negro" Literature, p. 87; November, 2005, review of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance; February, 2007, review of Harlem Speaks.

Reference Reviews, February, 2005, John Lawrence, review of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance.

School Library Journal, November, 2006, Joyce Adams Burner, review of Harlem Speaks, p. 165.

Southwestern Historical Quarterly, January, 1994, Arnold R. Hirsch, review of Black Dixie, p. 583.

Western Historical Quarterly, May, 1993, Quintard Taylor, review of Black Dixie, p. 255; winter, 1996, Gerald Horne, review of African American Political Thought, 1890-1930.