Arna Bontemps

Arna Wendell Bontemps (October 13, 1902 – June 4, 1973) was an American poet, novelist and librarian, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance.

Bontemps was born in 1902 in Alexandria, Louisiana, into a Louisiana Creole family.

His ancestors included free people of color and French colonists.

His father was a contractor and sometimes would take his son to construction sites.

As the boy got older, his father would take him along to speak-easies at night that featured jazz.

His mother, Maria Carolina Pembroke, was a schoolteacher.

The family was Catholic, and Bontemps was baptized at St. Francis Xavier Cathedral.

They would later become Seventh-day Adventists.

When Bontemps was three years old, his family moved to Los Angeles, California, in the Great Migration of blacks out of the South and into cities of the North, Midwest and West.

They settled in what became known as the Watts district.

After attending public schools, Bontemps attended Pacific Union College in Angwin, California, where he graduated in 1923.

He majored in English and minored in history, and he was also a member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity.

Following his graduation, Bontemps met and befriended the author Wallace Thurman, founder of Fire!! magazine, in his job at Los Angeles Post Office.

Bontemps later traveled to New York City, where he settled and became part of the Harlem Renaissance.

In August 1924, at the age of 22, Bontemps published his first poem, "Hope" (originally called "A Record of the Darker Races"), in The Crisis, official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

He depicted hope as an "empty bark" drifting meaninglessly with no purpose, referring to his confusion about his career.

Bontemps, along with many other West Coast intellectuals, traveled to New York during the Harlem Renaissance.

After graduation, he moved to New York in 1924 to teach at the Harlem Academy (present-day Northeastern Academy) in New York City.

While teaching, Bontemps continued to write and publish poetry.

In both 1926 and 1927, he received the Alexander Pushkin Prize of Opportunity, an academic journal published by the National Urban League.

In 1926 he won the Crisis Poetry Prize.

In New York, Bontemps met other writers who became lifelong friends, including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay and Jean Toomer.

Hughes became a role model, collaborator, and dear friend to Bontemps.

In 1926 Bontemps married Alberta Johnson, with whom he had six children.

From oldest to youngest they are: Joan, Paul, Poppy, Camille, Connie and Alex.

In the early 1930s, Bontemps began to publish fiction, in addition to more poetry.

During the early 1930s, African-American writers and intellectuals were discriminated against in Northern Alabama.

In 1931, he left New York and his teaching position at the Harlem Academy as the Great Depression deepened.

He and his family moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where he had a teaching position at Oakwood Junior College for three years.

He received a considerable amount of attention for his first novel, God Sends Sunday (1931).

This novel explored the story of an African-American jockey named Little Augie who easily earns money and carelessly squanders it.

Little Augie ends up wandering through the black sporting world when his luck as a jockey eventually runs out.

Bontemps was praised for his poetic style, his re-creation of the black language, and his distinguishing characters throughout this novel.

However, despite the abundant amount of praise, W. E. B. Du Bois viewed it as "sordid" and equated it with other "decadent" novels of the Harlem Renaissance.

Later in his career, Bontemps collaborated with Countee Cullen to create a dramatic adaption of the novel.

In 1932, he collaborated with Langston Hughes and wrote Popo and Fifina.

This story followed the lives of siblings Popo and Fifina, in an easy to understand introduction to Haitian life for children.

Bontemps continued writing children's novels and published You Can't Pet a Possum (1934), which followed a story of a boy and his pet dog living in a rural part of Alabama.

Together in 1946 they published this adaption as St. Louis Woman.

Bontemps also began to write several children's books.