Chapter 1 focuses on the career of Harlem writer Aubrey Bowser, who began his career editing the uplift literary journal The Rainbow, the official organ of Reverend Frederick A. Cullen’s Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, and who then re-edited some of that material, which, in turn, appeared in the New York Amsterdam News, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the Baltimore Afro-American. The printscape of Bowser’s work reveals the pressures that Jazz Age Black journalism placed on writers committed to racial uplift, as well as how Black newspapers bridged tensions between religious, dry, daytime tenets and wet, nighttime indulgence. As the Black press advertised, reported on, and editorialized “uplift” events concurrently with Harlem nightlife, it encouraged readers to mitigate at least some of the ideological divisions by offering a cosmopolitan vision of the New Negro. Within this context, the cultural work of Bowser’s fiction, especially after 1925 when most Black newspapers shifted their stance and saw Prohibition as a failure, assuaged readers that “knowing” wet Harlem did not mean abandoning the church and that attending church did not mean condemning the cabaret.