The Harlem Renaissance was the most significant event in African American intellectual and cultural life in the twentieth century. Its most obvious manifestation was in a self-conscious literary movement, but it touched almost every component of African American creative culture in the period from World War I through the Great Depression: music, the visual arts, theater, and literature. It also affected politics, social development, and almost every phase of the African American experience in the 1920s and 1930s.