Countee Cullen

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Countee Cullen (born May 30, 1903 – January 9, 1946) was an American poet, novelist, children's writer, and playwright, who was particularly well known during the Harlem Renaissance.

Early life

Countee LeRoy Porter was born on May 30, 1903, to Elizabeth Thomas Lucas. Historians have a difficult time determining his birthplace due to a lack of records of his early childhood. Baltimore, Maryland, New York City, and Louisville, Kentucky, Kentucky, are all possibilities. Although Cullen claimed to be born in New York City, he also referred to Louisville, Kentucky, as his birthplace on legal applications. Amanda Porter, who is believed to be his paternal grandmother who cared for him until her death in 1917, took Cullen from Harlem at the age of nine.

Although the adoption may not have been legal, Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, pastor of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, Harlem's largest congregation, and his wife, Carolyn Belle Mitchell, adopted the 15-year-old Countee Porter, according to his. Frederick Cullen was a central figure in Countee's life and served as his father. The influential minister will eventually serve as president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Cullen attended DeWitt Clinton High School, which later became Hell's Kitchen. He excelled academically at the university and began writing poetry. He was crowned the champion of a citywide poetry competition. He was elected into the deWitt newspaper as editor of the weekly newspaper and was named vice president of his graduating class. He received honors in Latin, Greek, Mathematics, and French in January 1922.

He attended New York University after graduating from high school. (NYU). Cullen's poem, "The Ballad of the Brown Girl," received second prize in the Witter Bynner National Poetry Competitions for Undergraduate Poetry, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America in 1923. He began writing poetry in national periodicals such as Harper's, Crisis, Money, The Bookman, and Poetry, earning him a national reputation. He finished second in the competition this year, but he would eventually win the first prize in 1925. He entered "To One Who Says Nay" as a sponsor of Opportunity and came in second, losing to Langston Hughes' "The Weary Blues" in second. Cullen graduated from New York University in 1925 and was one of eleven students to be selected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Cullen began studying English as a master's in English and published Color, his first collection of poems that later became a classic of the Harlem Renaissance. The work, which was written in a deliberate, traditional style, celebrated black beauty while debating the consequences of racism. "Heritage" and "Incident" were two of his most popular poems in the collection. William Wordsworth and William Blake's literary influence was shown by "Yet Do I Marvel," about racial identity and injustice, but the subject was far from the Romantic sonnets' world. The poet acknowledges that there is God, and that "God is generous, well-meaning, kind," but he finds a contradiction in his own struggle in a neoliberal society: he is black and a poet. Cullen earned a master's degree in 1926 while simultaneously serving as the guest editor of a special "Negro Poets" issue of the poetry magazine, Palms. Harper was invited by Harper to edit an anthology of Black poetry in 1927.

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Professional career

The Harlem Renaissance, a cultural, artistic, and musical revival, was the first time in American history that a substantial body of literary, art, and musical work by African-American writers and artists was contributed to. Cullen was at the forefront of this new-found literary revival. Poetry was regarded as raceless by the poet. However, his poem "The Black Christ" took on a racial theme, depicting a black youth found guilty of a felony he did not commit. "But his career was almost [free] of racial interest" shortly after in the early 1930s. Instead, his poetry concentrated on idyllic beauty and other classic romantic topics."

Cullen worked as assistant editor for Opportunity magazine, where his column "The Dark Tower" boosted his literary profile. Cullen's poetry collections The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927) and Copper Sun (1927) both explored similar themes as Color, but they were not as popular as well as None. The Guggenheim Fellowship of 1928 allowed Cullen to study and write in other countries.

Cullen travelled back and forth between France and the United States between 1928 and 1934. Cullen had four volumes of poetry by 1929. The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929) title poem was chastised for the use of Christian religious imagery; Cullen compared the lynching of a black man to Jesus' crucifixion.

Cullen, as well as writing books, also promoted the work of other black writers. However, his reputation as a poet had waned by 1930. One Way to Heaven, a social comedy of lower-class blacks and the bourgeoisie in New York City, was his only novel published in 1932.

He taught English, French, and creative writing at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in New York City from 1934 to the end of his life. He wrote two works for young readers during this period: The Lost Zoo (1940), poems about the animals that were killed in the flood, and How I Lost Them, an autobiography of his cat. Cullen, as well as Herman W. Porter, gave a young James Baldwin advice during his time at the university.

Cullen wrote mainly for the theatre in the last years of his life. He collaborated with Arna Bontemps to rewrite Bontemps' 1931 book God Sends on Sunday as the musical St. Louis Woman (1946, 1971), first published in 1971. Both black composer Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer composed the score. Black intellectuals chastised the Broadway musical for promoting a negative image of black Americans in a poor black neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri. Cullen translated the Greek tragedy Medea by Euripides, which was released in 1935 as The Medea and Some Poems, in another form.

Cullen died of elevated blood pressure and uremic poisoning on January 9, 1946, aged 42. He is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City.

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