"Countee Cullen"[May 30,1903-January 9, 1946]

Was an American poet who was popular during the Harlem Renaissance.Countee was an

American poet and a leading figure with Langston Hughes in the Harlem Renaissance.This 120s artistic movement produced the first large body of work in the United States written by African Americans.Countee considered poetry raceless,his The Black Christ took a racial theme,lynching of a black youth for a crime he did not commit.He was very secretive about his life.According to different sources,he was born in Louisville Kentucky or Baltimore Maryland.Countee was possibly abandoned by his mother,and reared by a woman named Mrs.Porter who was probably his paternal grandmother.Countee once said that he born in New York City,but may not meat it literally.Mrs. Porter brought young Countee to Harlem when he was nine.She in in 1918.At the age of 15 he was adopted unofficially by the Rev. F.A. Cullen, a minister of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church,one of the largest congregations of Harlem.Later Rev.Cullen became head of the Harlem chapter of the NAACP.His real mother did not contact him until he became famous in the1920s.As a schoolboy,he won a city-wide poetry contest and saw his winning stanus widely reprinted.With the help of Rev. Cullen,Countee he attended the prestigious De Witt Clinton High School in Manhattan.After graduating he entered New York University,where his works attracted critical attention.Countee first collection of poems,Color (1925),was published in the same year he graduated from NYU.Written in a careful traditional style,the work celebrated black beauty and deplored the effects of racism.The book included "Heritage"and "Incident," probably his most famous poems."Yet Do I Marvel,"about about racial identity and injustice,showed the influenced of the literary expression of William Wordsworth and William Blake,but its subject was far from the world of their Romantic sonnets.The poet accepts that there is god,and "God is good,well-meaning, kind,"but he finds a contradiction of his own plight in a racist society:he is black and a poet.His Color was a landmark of the Harlem Renaissance.The movement was centered in the cosmopolitan community of Harlem,in New York City.During the 1920s,a fresh generation of writers emerged,a few were Harlem-born.Other leading figures included Alain Locke (The New Negro,1925),James Weldon Johnson (Black Manhattan,1930),Claude McKay(Home to Harlem,1928),Langston Hughes (The Weary Blues,1926),Zora Neale Hurston (Jonah's Gourd Vine,1943),Wallace Thurman(Harlem :A Melodrama of Negro Life,1929) Jean Toomer (Cane,1923)and Arna Bontemps (Black Thunder,1935).The movement was accelerated by grants and scholarships and supported by such white writers Carl Van Vechten.A brilliant student,Countee graduated from New York University Phi Beta Kappa.He attended Harvard,earning his masters degree in 1926.Countee worked as assistant editor for Opportunity magazine,where his column."The Dark Tower,"increased his literary reputation.Countee poetry collections The Ballard of the Brown Girl (1927) and Cooper Sun (1927) explored similar themes as Color but they were not so well received.His Guggenheim Fellowship of 1928 enabled him to study and write abroad.He met Nina Yolanda Du Bois,daughter of W.B.D. Dubois,the leading intellectual.At that time Yolanda was involved romantically with a popular band leader.Between the years 1928&1934,he travelled back and forth between France an the United States.By 1929 he had published four volumes of poetry.The title poem of The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929)was criticized for the use of Christian religious imagery-Countee compared the lynching of a black man to the crucificationof Jesus.He married Yolanda DuBois in April 1928.The marriage was the social event of the decade,but the marriage did not fare well,and he divorced in 1930.It is widely said that Countee was a homosexual,and his relationship Harold Jackman was a significant factor in the divorce.Harold was a teacher whom Carl Van Vechten had used as a model in Nigger Heaven (1926).In 1940,Countee married Ida Mae Robertson,whom he known for ten years.As well as writing books himself, Countee promoted the work of other black writers. In the late 1920shis reputation as a poet waned.In 1932 appeared his only novel,One Way to Heaven,a social comedy of lower-class blacks and bourgeoisie in New York City.From 1934 until the end of his life,he taught English,French,and creative writing at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in New York City.During this period,he also wrote two books for young readers,The (1940),poems about animals who perished in the Floor,and My Lives and How I Lost Them, an autobiography of his cat.In the last years of his life,Countee wrote mostly for the theatre.He worked with Arna Bontemps to adapt his 1931 novel God Sends Sunday into St.Louis Woman for the musical stage.Its score was composed by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer,both white.The Broadyway musical,set in a poor black neighborhood in St.Louis,was criticized by black intellectuals for creating a negative image of black Americans.Countee also translated the Greek tragedy Medea by Euripides,which was published in 1935 as the Medea and Some Poems with a collection of sonnets and short lyrics.