Recognized initially for the few short stories and published paintings, Nugent had a long productive career bringing to light the creative process of gay and black culture.

[2] After revealing to his mother that he had decided to devote his life to only making art, she worried about his lack of interest in getting a stable job, so she sent him to Washington D.C. to live with his grandmother.

While working there he experimented with passing and went by the name Ricardo Nugen di Dosocta, even going as far as giving an address located in the Spanish legation in Washington.

[4] The majority of his life and career took place in Harlem in New York City, and he died of congestive heart failure on May 27, 1987, in Hoboken, New Jersey.

[1] Before committing his life to his art, Bruce Nugent worked several ordinary jobs, including that as a hat seller, a delivery boy, and a bellhop.

[13] It is a Roman à clef, reimagining the life of Harlem Renaissance poet and writer, Jean Toomer.

[14] Due to Nugent's clearly-stated open attraction to other men, his intentions with his marriage to Grace were never clear, as they were not romantic.

[citation needed] Nugent's aggressive and honest approach to homoerotic and interracial desire was not necessarily in the favor of his more discreet homosexual contemporaries.

for its radicalism, and specifically Nugent's "Smoke, Lilies and Jade" for promoting the effeminacy and decadence associated with homosexual writers.

[1][10] Nugent's friends, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, Gwendolyn Bennett, and John P. Davis, all frequented "Niggerati Manor", where they socialized with each other and where the origination of "Fire!!!"

Nugent bridged the gap between the Harlem Renaissance and the black gay movement of the 1980s, and was a great inspiration to many of his contemporaries.

Alain LeRoy Locke, an African-American philosopher, educator and writer, asked Richard Bruce Nugent to contribute to his anthology The New Negro.

His short story takes place in East Africa and centers on a small tribe in the area of Warpuri.

It premiered at Howard University in the late 1920s and was also produced at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, in the summer of 1932.

The play concerns the psychological and moral growth of its protagonist Alex as he reflects on his love for a man named Beauty (a composite character of all the men the protagonist has loved intimately throughout his life) and a woman named Melva (a character loosely based on Nugent's wife, Grace Elizabeth Marr) as well as the relationships, racial injustices and personal tragedies that befell many of his Jazz Age Harlem compatriots.

The play was initially commissioned by the Joseph Papp Public Theater[19] and was later produced by the CalArts Center for New Performance.