This chapter focuses on romans à clef of the Harlem Renaissance. It argues that Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring (1932) and Richard Bruce Nugent’s Gentleman Jigger (2008), read together, foreground the tensions between originality and derivativeness, individual “genius” and collaboration that were being negotiated more broadly in the modernist art of the period. On the one hand, both Infants of the Spring and Jigger are invested in models of artistry that valorize “individuality” and “genius” over “standardization” and derivativeness. On the other hand, the texts themselves – which explicitly address the question of plagiarism through differently inflected scenes describing the same event – suggest that a model of authorship or artistry that does not accommodate collaboration, borrowing, and even outright theft is gravely deficient.

This chapter backtracks to 1601, revealing that the vogue for novels said to be true (pseudofactual) was in fact the outcome of previous evolutions, rather than simply a traditional practice or a reaction against an earlier fanciful novel (often called romance). Specifically, during the seventeenth century the novel mimed epic and tragedy in borrowing its protagonists from history, becoming measurably more “Aristotelian” starting around the 1630s. It was this Aristotelian novel that subsequently declined in the face of the pseudofactual novel described in Chapter 1. Taken together, these two chapters demonstrate that modern critical investment in a “single birth” narrative — i.e., that the novel rose where once there was nothing like it — is untenable.