Bontemps, Arna

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Bontemps, Arna

October 13, 1902
June 4, 1973

Arna Bontemps—poet, playwright, novelist, critic, editor, and anthologist—was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. His work is distinguished by a passionate struggle for liberation and a mystical faith in the unseen. The latter may derive from his early religious training, for his parents were Seventh-Day Adventists. Born in Alexandria, Louisiana, Bontemps grew up in Los Angeles. The early death of his mother left him in the care of an austere father and his grandparents. Upon his graduation from San Fernando Academy in 1920, he enrolled in Pacific Union College, another Seventh-Day Adventist institution, where he earned an A.B. degree in 1923.

In 1924 Bontemps went to New York, where he met other young writers, including Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay. He was stimulated by the cultural vitality of New York—its theater, its music, its concern with world affairs, and the struggle of its black people for social recognition and cultural realization. Bontemps taught in Adventist schools, such as the Harlem Academy, and began his serious career as a writer. His first novel, God Sends Sunday, published in 1931, is the story of Little Augie, a jockey who earns a great deal of money and spends it lavishly on brothels, women, and fancy cars. The character was suggested by a great-uncle of Bontemps. Bontemps and Countee Cullen transformed the story of Little Augie into a musical, St. Louis Woman, which played on Broadway in 1946.

Bontemps's historical novel Black Thunder (1936), among the first of the genre in African-American literature, was based on a Virginia slave revolt in 1800. Drums at Dusk (1939), more superficial and romantic than Black Thunder, deals with the Pierre Toussaint-L'Ouverture uprising in Haiti. Other historical works include We Have Tomorrow (1945) and the biography Frederick Douglass: Slave, Fighter, Freeman (1958). In collaboration with Jack Conroy, Bontemps wrote a history of black migration, They Seek a City (1945; updated in 1966 as Any Place but Here ).

In 1932 Bontemps coauthored, with Langston Hughes, Popo and Fifine: Children of Haiti. He and Conroy also produced a series of original tales for children: The Fast Sooner Hound (1942); Slappy Hooper, the Wonderful Sign Painter (1946); and Sam Patch, the High, Wide and Handsome Jumper (1951). In writing books for children, Bontemps made a major contribution, since juvenile literature written by and for African Americans was virtually nonexistent at the time. In 1956 he received the Jane Addams Children's Book Award for Story of the Negro (1948).

Throughout his career, Bontemps produced original poetry, notable for its brooding quality and its suggestive treatment of protest and black pride. "A Black Man Talks of Reaping," which won a Crisis magazine first prize in 1926, is one of the strongest of his protest poems. "Golgotha Is a Mountain" and "The Return" won the Alexander Pushkin Award for Poetry offered by Opportunity magazine in 1926 and 1927, respectively. Personals, a collection of his poems, was published in 1963 by Paul Bremen in London.

In 1943 Bontemps became head librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee; in 1965 he became director of university relations. From 1966 to 1969 he was a professor at the Chicago Circle campus of the University of Illinois and in 1969 served as visiting professor and curator of the James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale University. In 1970 he returned to Fisk as writer-in-residence; he died there in 1973.

See also Cullen, Countee; Harlem Renaissance; Hughes, Langston; McKay, Claude