Arna Bontemps

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Following his graduation, Bontemps met and befriended the author Wallace Thurman, 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 he was teaching, Bontemps continued to 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 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 the Oakwood Junior College for three years.

In the early 1930s, Bontemps began to publish fiction, in addition to more poetry. 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. Together in 1946 they published this adaption as St. Louis Woman.

Bontemps also began to write several children's books. 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.

During the early 1930s, African-American writers and intellectuals were not welcomed in Northern Alabama. Just thirty miles from Huntsville in Decatur, the Scottsboro boys were being tried in court. During this time, Bontemps had many friends visit and stay with him while they came to Alabama to protest this trial. The school administration was worried about his many out-of-state visitors. In later years, Bontemps said that the administration at Oakwood Junior College had demanded he burn many of his private books to demonstrate that he had given up radical politics. Bontemps refused to do so. He resigned from his teaching position and returned with his family to California in 1934.

In 1936 Bontemps published what is considered as some of his best work, Black Thunder. This novel recounts the tale of a rebellion that took place in 1800 near Richmond, Virginia led by Gabriel Prosser, an uneducated field worker and coachman. It shares Prosser's attempted plan to conduct a slave army to raid an armory in Richmond, and once armed with weapons, defend themselves against any assailants. A fellow slave betrayed Prosser, causing the rebellion to be shut down. Prosser was captured by whites and lynched. In Bontemps' version, whites were compelled to admit that slaves were humans who had possibilities of a promising life.

Black Thunder received many extraordinary reviews by both African-American and mainstream journals, for example, the Saturday Review of Literature. Despite these rave reviews, Bontemps did not earn enough from sales of the novel to support his family in Chicago, where he had moved shortly before he published the novel. He briefly taught in Chicago at the Shiloh Academy but did not stay long, leaving for a job with the WPA Illinois Writers' Project (IWP). The WPA had writers working on histories of states and major cities. The Illinois Project, was one of the most successful state projects employing a number of noted writers, who in addition to the project work also had time to work on their own writings. Bontemps, in addition to other work for the IWP, oversaw such writers as Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Katherine Dunham, Fenton Johnson, Frank Yerby, Richard Durham, Kitty Chapelle, and Robert Lucas, in creating the Cavalcade of the American Negro and other works, in what became a massive collection of writings on the "Negro in Illinois".

In 1938, following the publication of children's book Sad-Faced Boy (1937), Bontemps was granted a Rosenwald fellowship to work on his novel, Drums at Dusk (1939). This was based on Toussaint L’Ouverture's slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue (which became the independent republic of Haiti). This book was more widely recognized than his other novels. Some critics viewed the plot as overdramatic, while others commended its characterizations.

Bontemps struggled to make enough from his books to support his family. However, more important, he gained little acknowledgement for his work despite being a prolific writer. This caused him to become discouraged as an African-American writer of this time. He started to believe that it was futile for him to attempt to address his writing to his own generation, so he chose to focus his serious writing on younger and more progressive audiences. Bontemps met Jack Conroy on the Illinois Writers’ Project, and in collaboration they wrote The Fast Sooner Hound (1942). This was a children's story about a hound dog, Sooner, who races and outruns trains. Embarrassed about this, the roadmaster puts him against the fastest train, the Cannon Ball.

Bontemps returned to graduate school and earned a master's degree in library science from the University of Chicago in 1943. He was appointed as head librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. During his time there, he developed important collections and archives of African-American literature and culture, namely the Langston Hughes Renaissance Collection. Bontemps was initiated as a member of the Zeta Rho chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia fraternity at Fisk in 1954. He served at Fisk until 1964 and would continue to return occasionally.

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