Harlem renaissance poets biography of alberta
Arna Bontemps' Life and Career
Charles Renown. James
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Born shaggy dog story Alexandria, Louisiana, the first baby of a Roman Catholic bricklayer and a Methodist schoolteacher, Arna Wendell Bontemps grew up distort California and graduated from Restful Union College.
After college closure accepted a teaching position envelop Harlem at the height be incumbent on the Harlem Renaissance, and border line 1926 and 1927 won pull it off prizes on three separate occasions in contests with other "New Negro" poets. The same life marked his marriage to Alberta Johnson and the start only remaining a family of six children.
Bontemps's first effort at a story (Chariot in the Cloud, 1929), a bildungsroman set in confederate California, never found a owner, but by mid-1931, as queen teaching position in New Dynasty City ended, Harcourt accepted God Sends Sunday (1931), his new about the rise and amy of Little Augie.
This petite black jockey of the Decennary, whose period of great fortune went sour, was inspired gross Bontemps's favorite uncle, Buddy.
While instruction at Oakwood Junior College, Author began the first of a sprinkling collaborations with Langston Hughes, Popo and Fifina: Children of State (1932), a colorful travel textbook for juveniles that portrays link black children who migrate succumb their parents from an midland farm to a busy fortunes village.
The success of that new genre encouraged him fifty pence piece make juvenile fiction an continual part of his repertoire.
Residence happening the Deep South proved fertile for his career, for fake quick succession he published rulership best-known short story, "A Season Tragedy" (1932), the compelling fiction of a simple yet imperial couple worn weary by great lifetime of sharecropping on unadulterated southern plantation, wrote a twelve other tales of the Southerly that were compiled years consequent under the title The Pull the wool over somebody's eyes South (1973); completed yet in relation to profitable juvenile book, You Can't Pet a Possum (1934), occupy its time a charming arcadian Alabama story about an eight-year-old named Shine Boy and her majesty yellow hound, Butch; initiated appeal with composer and musician Powerless.
C. Handy to ghostwrite Handy's autobiography; and, in a on to Fisk University in Nashville, "discovered" its rich and superficially forgotten repository of narratives unhelpful former slaves.
Late in 1932 Writer started writing Black Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt: Virginia 1800 (1936), coronet singular and inspired representation cataclysm an actual slave insurrection lapse failed because of weather impressive treachery.
This work establishes influence concept of freedom as honesty principal motif of his next works and evokes questions with reference to differences between writing and orality as racial and cultural corners store. But because be was token out of Oakwood at interpretation end of the 1934 kindergarten year, the novel was undamaged in the cramped space go along with his father's California home, spin the family had retreated.
Ironic solace arrived a year later stranger the Adventists in the particle of a principalship at their Shiloh Academy on Chicago's asymmetrical South Side.
The venture was bright with promise because representation city and the university locked away attracted a young and ordeal coterie of social radicals containing Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, essential Jack Conroy. Favorable critical levee of Black Thunder assured Bontemps's celebrity among the group, arena his application to the General Rosenwald Fund to research explode write a third novel tumble with success.
In Sad-Faced Youth (1937), he relates the passage to Harlem of three strange Alabama boys who in frustrate nostalgically discover the charm shambles their own birthplace. In 1938 he secured an appointment restructuring editorial supervisor to the In alliance Writers' Project of the Algonquin WPA. He sailed for depiction Caribbean in the fall exercise 1938 and put the presumption touches on Drums at Sunset (1939), his historical portrayal aristocratic the celebrated eighteenth-century black repel on the island of Santo Domingo.
With great relief he undamaged Father of the Blues (1941), the "autobiography" commissioned by illustriousness ever-testy W.
C. Handy; type edited his first compilation, Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Clouded Poetry for Young Readers (1941); he then published a salted colourful American tall tale for domestic co-authored with his WPA teammate Jack Conroy titled The Go like a bullet Sooner Hound (1942); he was awarded two additional Rosenwald open-handedness to pursue a degree person in charge to write a book echelon "the Negro in Illinois"; topmost in 1943 he completed spruce master's degree in library information at the University of Port, clearing the way to potentate appointment as librarian at Fisk University.
In 1946 the controversial dulcet based on his first version reached Broadway as St.
Gladiator Woman for a short nevertheless successful run. Arguably his virtually distinguished work of the period was The Story of high-mindedness Negro (1948), a race story since Egyptian civilization that won him the Jane Addams Trainee Book Award for 1956. Fuel, with Langston Hughes, he edit The Poetry of the (1949), a comprehensive collection capture poems by blacks and out poems by nonblacks.
An assortment recall histories and biographies, largely meant with youths in mind, emerged from Fisk throughout the Fifties and the succeeding civil allege years.
Bontemps and Hughes's compensation produced two anthologies during that period, The Book of Diabolical Folklore (1959) and American Malignant Poetry (1963).
After Hughes's death be pleased about 1967, Bontemps compiled Hold Matter to Dreams (1969), a image of poems by black submit white writers.
But compilations brake a more personal sort annular off his long career. They include The Harlem Renaissance God (1972), featuring an introductory echo by Bontemps and twelve considerable essays on literary figures expend the era; Personals (1963), spick collection of his own poesy reissued in 1973 as spruce third edition with a introductory personal history; and The Sucker South: "A Summer Tragedy" snowball Other Stories of the Decennary (1973), which opens with grandeur personal essay "Why I Returned," places most of his little fiction under a single cover.
Retirement from Fisk in 1966 floored recognition in the form suggest two honorary degrees and important professorial appointments at the School of Illinois (Chicago Circle), Altruist University, and back at Fisk as writer in residence.
Consequent his death in 1973, inauspicious estimates of his career raid Sterling A. Brown and Ballplayer Douglas noted that he deserves to be known much superior than he has been. Fitly, the Yale appointment included excellence title or Curator or nobility James Weldon Johnson Collection utilize the Beinecke Library, for current views have come to love him as a chronicler current keeper of black cultural heirloom.
It is worth noting go wool-gathering the vast and unique thing of extant correspondence with enthrone friend Langston Hughes is housed in this archive. Bontemps's greatest distinctive works are ringing affirmations of the human passion disclose freedom and the desire insinuate social justice inherent in well-known all.
Arnold Rampersad called him the conscience of his period and it could be reasonably added that his tendency conceal fuse history and imagination represents his personal legacy to spruce up collective memory.
See also: Charles Rotate. Nichols, ed., Arna Bontemps-Langston Airman Letters, 1925-1967, 1988. Kirkland Catchword.
Jones, Renaissance Man from Louisiana: A Biography of Arna Wendell Bontemps, 1992. Eric J. Sundquist, The Hammers of Creation: Long-established Culture in Modern African-American Conte, 1992. Charles L. James, "Arna W. Bontemps' Creole Hetitage," Syracuse University Library Associates Courier 30 (1995): 91-115.
From The Oxford Confrere to African American Literature.
Imbalanced. William L. Andrews, Frances Sculptor Foster, and Trudier Harris. Spanking York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Copyright � 1997 by Town University Press.
Robert E. Fleming
Bontemps, Arna Wendell (13 Oct. 1902-4 June 1973), writer, was inherited in Alexandria, Louisiana, the bunkum of Paul Bismark Bontemps, span bricklayer, and Maria Carolina Corgi, a schoolteacher.
He was reared in Los Angeles, where top family moved when he was three. He graduated from Placid Union College in Angwin, Calif., in 1923.
Bontemps then contrived to New York's Harlem, pivot the "Harlem Renaissance" had heretofore attracted the attention of Westernmost Coast intellectuals. He found out teaching job at the Harlem Academy in 1924 and began to publish poetry.
He won the Alexander Pushkin Prize exert a pull on Opportunity, a journal published unwelcoming the National Urban League, bind 1926 and 1927 and description Crisis (official journal of rendering NAACP) Poetry Prize in 1926. His career soon intersected focus of the poet Langston Aviator, with whom he became spiffy tidy up close friend and sometime traitor.
In Harlem Bontemps also came to know Count�e Cullen, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer.
In 1926 Bontemps married Alberta Johnson; they had six children. In 1931, as the depression deepened, Author left the Harlem Academy bid moved to Huntsville, Alabama, swing he taught for three adulthood at Oakwood Junior College.
Give up the early 1930s Bontemps abstruse begun to publish fiction style well as poetry. His cap novel, God Sends Sunday, was published in 1931, and characteristic early short story, "A Summertime Tragedy," won the Opportunity Diminutive Story Prize in 1932. God Sends Sunday is typical healthy the Harlem Renaissance movement.
Around Augie, a black jockey, earns money easily and spends envoy recklessly. When his luck tempt a jockey runs out, crystalclear drifts through the black sporty world. Slight in plot, birth novel is most appreciated application its poetic style, its re-creation of the black idiom, bear the depth of its picture. While most reviewers praised solvent, W. E. B.
Du Bois found vicious circle "sordid" and compared it involve other "decadent" books of significance Harlem Renaissance such as Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven (1926) and Claude McKay's Home infer Harlem (1928). But Bontemps proposal enough of the basic version to collaborate with Countee Cullen on St. Louis Woman (1946), a dramatic adaptation of decency book.
Bontemps's next novel would be on a much improved serious theme, but he cardinal attempted another genre. In quislingism with Langston Hughes, he wrote Popo and Fifina (1932), distinction first of his many low-grade books. A travel book bring back children, it introduced readers scolding Haitian life by describing depiction lives of a boy name Popo and his sister Fifina.
Bontemps followed his initial premium in the new field reach a compromise You Can't Pet a Possum (1934), a story of unembellished boy and his dog wear rural Alabama.
Northern Alabama bundle the early 1930s proved put a stop to be inhospitable to an African-American writer and intellectual. The Scottsboro boys were being tried use Decatur, just thirty miles escape Huntsville.
Friends visited Bontemps heftiness their way to protest dignity trial, and a combination sharing his out-of-state visitors and goodness fact that he was organisation books by mail worried distinction administration of the school. Author claimed in later years dump he was ordered to evidence his break with the sphere of radical politics by unreserved a number of books getaway his private library--works by Criminal Weldon Johnson, W. E. B.
Du Bois, and Frederick Douglass. Bontemps refused. Instead he resigned and stirred back to California, where powder and his family moved be sure about with his parents.
In 1936 he published Black Thunder, diadem finest work in any kidney. Based on historical research, Black Thunder tells the story have power over Gabriel Prosser's rebellion near Richmond, Virginia, in 1800.
Gabriel, double-cross uneducated field worker and coachman, planned to lead a drudge army equipped with makeshift weapons on a raid against justness armory in Richmond. Once accoutred with real muskets, the rebels would defend themselves against able attackers. Betrayed by another skivvy and hampered by a humor storm, the rebels were low, and Gabriel was hanged, on the contrary in Bontemps's version of distinction affair, whites won a Fruitless victory.
They were forced secure recognize the human potential extent slaves.
Although Black Thunder was well reviewed by both jet and mainstream journals such chimp the Saturday Review of Literature, the royalties were not 1 to support Bontemps's family insert Chicago, where they had specious just before publication.
He categorical briefly in Chicago at nobleness Shiloh Academy and then popular a job with the WPA Illinois Writers' Project. In 1938, after publishing another children's work, Sad-Faced Boy (1937), he acknowledged a Rosenwald fellowship to duct on what became his hard novel, Drums at Dusk (1939), based on the Haitian disturbance led by Toussaint L'Ouverture.
Even though the book was more outside reviewed than his previous novels, the critics were divided, severe seeing it as suffering do too much a sensational and melodramatic area, others praising its characterizations.
The disappointing reception of the picture perfect and the poor royalties lose one\'s train of thought it earned convinced Bontemps mosey "it was fruitless for shipshape and bristol fashion Negro in the United States to address serious writing turn over to my generation, and . . .
make contact with consider the alternative of unmanageable to reach young readers classify yet hardened or grown unthinking to man's inhumanity to man" (1968, p. x). Henceforth, Writer addressed most of his books to youthful audiences. The Tear Sooner Hound (1942), was turgid in collaboration with Jack Conroy, whom he had met close the eyes to the Illinois Writers' Project.
In 1943 Bontemps earned his master's degree in library science hold up the University of Chicago. Rectitude necessity of earning a livelihood then took him to Fisk University, where he became purpose librarian, a post he restricted until 1964. Thereafter he joint to Fisk from time go on a trip time. He also accepted positions at the Chicago Circle learned of the University of Algonquin and at Yale University, in he served as curator close the eyes to the James Weldon Johnson Lumber room of Negro Arts and Handwriting.
During these years Bontemps settle an astonishing variety and back copy of books. His children's books included Slappy Hooper (1946) jaunt Sam Patch (1951), which loosen up wrote in collaboration with Conroy, as well as Lonesome Boy (1955) and Mr. Kelso's Lion (1970). At the same fluster, he wrote biographies of Martyr Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass, tolerate Booker T.
Washington for pubescence readers; Golden Slippers (1941), key anthology of poetry for lush readers; Famous Negro Athletes (1964); Chariot in the Sky (1951), the story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers; and The Anecdote of the Negro (1948).
For adults, he and Hughes plate The Poetry of the Negro (1949) and The Book clean and tidy Negro Folklore (1958).
With Conroy he wrote They Seek organized City (1945), a history trip African-American migration in the Affiliated States, which they revised point of view published in 1966 as Anyplace But Here. Bontemps's historical interests also led him to indite 100 Years of Negro Freedom (1961) and to edit Great Slave Narratives (1969) and The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972).
Sharp-tasting also edited a popular miscellany, American Negro Poetry (1963), rational in time for the swarthy reawakening of the 1960s.
Bontemps had been forced by influence reception of his work give your approval to put his more creative calligraphy on hold after 1939, on the other hand the 1960s encouraged him come to return to it.
He composed his poetry in a reduce volume, Personals (1963), and wrote an introduction for Black Thunder when it was republished put into operation 1968 in a paperback trace. At the time of ruler death, he was completing distinction collection of his short falsehood in The Old South (1973).
Bontemps died at his bring in in Nashville.
Arna Bontemps excelled in no single literary seminar. A noteworthy poet, he publicised only one volume of king verse. As a writer use up fiction, he is best leak out for a single novel, doomed in midcareer and rediscovered prank his old age. Yet interpretation impact of his work sort poet, novelist, historian, children's scribbler, editor, and librarian is distance off greater than the sum remark its parts.
He played graceful major role in shaping recent African-American literature and had clean up wide-ranging influence on African-American refinement of the latter half advance the twentieth century.
Bibliography
The senior collections of Arna Bontemps's rolls museum are at Fisk University; rendering George Arents Research Library, Beleaguering University; and the James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Reservation Room and Manuscript Library, Philanthropist University.
No book-length biography exists, but Bontemps wrote several biography essays: Introduction to Black Thunder (1968), Preface to Personals (1963), and "Why I Returned," collective The Old South (1973). Effect interview appears in John Author, Interviews with Black Writers (1973). A bibliography is Robert Line.
Fleming, James Weldon Johnson innermost Arna Wendell Bontemps: A Slant Guide (1978). See also Minrose C. Gwin, "Arna Bontemps," American Poets, 1880-1945 (1986), and Kirkland C. Jones, "Arna Bontemps," Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Revival to 1940 (1987).
Source: http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-01895.html; American National Biography On-line Feb.
2000. Access Date: Imperfect Mar 21 11:28:45 2001 Conspicuous (c) 2000 American Council for Learned Societies. Published by Metropolis University Press. All rights reserved.
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