White Women in Harlem's Renaissance Courtesy of Janet K. Ruttenberg Carla Kaplan, a professor of American literature at Northeastern University, offers a joint biography of six largely forgotten women (winnowed down from five dozen whom she researched) in "Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance" (Harper, $28.99). The convention-bending women included philanthropists, educators, heiresses and novelists who figured in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s as patrons, muses and editors and in assorted other roles that Professor Kaplan, a biographer of the writer Zora Neale Hurston, captivatingly illuminates and places in overdue perspective. "We have documented every other imaginable form of female identity in the Jazz Age - the New Woman, the spinster, the flapper, the Gibson Girl, the bachelor girl, the bohemian, the twenties "mannish" lesbian, the suffragist, the invert and so on," she writes. "But until now, the full story of the white women of black Harlem, the women collectively referred to as "Miss Anne," has never been told." Professor Kaplan tells it engagingly, highlighting her subjects" decisions to embrace blackness and repudiate their own whiteness - and the rewards and costs of their modern rebellion. "We have enough police here to stop a revolution," Commissioner Lewis J. Valentine declared outside Madison Square Garden on Feb. 20, 1939. What was going on inside might have been far short of revolutionary, but it was nonetheless revolting: 22,000 Nazi sympathizers celebrating Hitler's Germany and castigating President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his "Jew Deal." In "Swastika Nation: Fritz Kuhn and the Rise and Fall of the German-American Bund" (St. Martin's Press, $27.99), Arnie Bernstein tells the story of the German-born Kuhn, who hoped to replace the United States government with a fascist dictatorship, and the real-life crusade of eccentric and unlikely allies that stopped him. After managing to infuriate his own followers and his fellow Americans, Kuhn ended up in prison for embezzlement and was booted back to Germany after the war. Mr. Bernstein takes Kuhn's campaign personally. The author was a high school student in Skokie, Ill., in the 1970s when neo-Nazis planned a march in the Chicago suburb, where about one in six Jews was a Holocaust survivor or related to one. "Kuhn was denaturalized and deported - but there is no invention to delouse him," Walter Winchell wrote in 1945. In this engrossing retelling, Winchell figured with Thomas E. Dewey, Fiorello H. La Guardia, a Manhattan congressman on the payroll of the Soviet spy agency and assorted gangsters to help Kuhn undo himself. Autumn arrives Sunday, but it's not too late to enjoy the magnificence of Central Park in spring and summer. "Gatherings" (Pointed Leaf Press, $95) assembles the artist Janet K. Ruttenberg's magnificent watercolors and chromatic oil paintings of the park for the first time, in an oversize volume being published in a limited edition of 500 copies. Luckily, the book complements a current exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, so readers who cannot find a copy can see Ms. Ruttenberg's mystical and inventive works in person at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street - and maybe take in a bit of nearby Central Park on the way.