This thesis explores connections between D. H. Lawrence and four key writers of the Harlem Renaissance: Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston. It investigates both the responses of these writers to Lawrence's work and the ways in which New Negro writers were frequently engaging in their work with the same themes, problems and ontological and philosophical questions as the English author. In demonstrating these unlikely instances both of influence and what I here call 'confluence' connecting these seemingly disparate artists and traditions, this study argues that these writers, though all historically figured as marginal (at best) to a now outmoded definition of modernism, emerge as central to new modernist thinking. By placing these authors in conversation, I position them as co-creators of modernism.