Dubbed the “joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s” by poet Langston Hughes, A’Lelia Walker, daughter of millionaire entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker, and author A’Lelia Bundles’s great-grandmother and namesake, is a fascinating figure whose legendary parties and “Dark Tower” salon helped define the Harlem Renaissance. After inheriting her mother’s hair-care enterprise, A’Lelia Walker would become America’s first high-profile black heiress and a prominent patron of the arts. Joy Goddess takes readers inside her three New York homes—a mansion, a townhouse, and a pied-à-terre—where she entertained Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, Florence Mills, James Weldon Johnson, Carl Van Vechten, W.E.B. DuBois, and other cultural, social, and intellectual luminaries of the Roaring Twenties.
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