Set in the Jim Crow South following World War I, The Fire in the Flint follows Dr. Kenneth Harper, a young, sometimes naive Black physician and war veteran. After graduating from a Northern medical school, he returns to his hometown of Central City, Georgia to start a practice. He arrives believing he can avoid discrimination by simply not getting involved with the town’s racial affairs—but he quickly finds out otherwise, and must confront the reality of living in a place where systemic racism and the Ku Klux Klan run rampant.

The Fire in the Flint , published in 1924, is American civil rights activist Walter White’s debut novel. Written during the height of the Harlem Renaissance—a period where African American literature flourished—White sought to promote anti-racist themes and showcase the oppression Black people faced in the early twentieth-century.