Essential passages form the works of more than 100 fifteenth-and sixteenth-century thinkers and writers, including Erasmus, Cervantes, Boccaccio, Montaigne, Bodin, Dürer, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Rabelais, Leonardo, Cellini, Copernicus, Galileo, Savonarola, Luther, and Calvin.

Gathering a representative sampling of the New Negro Movement's most important figures, and providing substantial introductory essays, headnotes, and brief biographical notes, Lewis' volume—organized chronologically—includes the poetry and prose of Sterling Brown, Countee Cullen, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and others.