"Marita Bonner" [June 16,1898-1971]

One of four children,she was born in Boston to Joseph and Mary Anne (Noel) Bonner.She was raised and educated,in Boston,attended Brookline,School where she received musical training and began mastering German.In 1918,she entered Raddcliff College,and was absorbed in English and comparative literature.Attending at a time When African American students were routinely denied dormitory accommodations,Marita commuted to campus.Nevertheless,she succeeded,winning the Radcliff song competitions in 1918 & 1922.Marita also continued to study musical composition German literature.While still a student,she taught at a high school in Cambridge.After Marita graduated from Radcliff in 1922,she moved to Washington,D.C. where she continued to teach.She also became closely associated with poet,playwright,composer Georgia Douglas Johnson,whose "S" Street salon was an important gathering place for many of the writers and artists associated with the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s.Marita also began to publish her writings in a journal like "The Crisis"the publication of the NAACP,and "Opportunity," the official journal Urban League.Her first published pieces,"Hands" and "On Being Young, a Woman-Colored," appeared in 1925.Her early essays,sketches,stories,and plays are notable for their brief,sometimes fragmentary character,lyricism,and experimental quality.Marita early works shows her fascination with characters of mixed race orgins.Marita also wrote three experimental plays during the 1920s,all of them symbolic explorations of the quest of African Americans for freedom and dignity after Emancipation.In 1926,she published "Nothing New," her first story explicitly set in Chicagoand the introducation of what would became her fictional universe,Frye Street.In 1930,she married William Almy Occomy.The couple moved to Chicago,where she lived for the next 41 years and raised three children.Marita resumed writing in 1933,publishing under married name,and began to explore the urban fictional terrain that would appear after her death under the title "Frye Street"and "Evironments." Marita's "Frye "Street" is a multi-ethinic urban universe,populated by by streams of people drawn by the promises of urban:Irish,Italian,Jewish,Chinese,French,and Southern African American migrants.Yet "Frye Street"is a fallen world,marked by sharp racial divisions and social strife-place where working people,particulary African American migrants to the city,struggle against impersonal and destructive forces of urban life.She wanted to chart this world at number of diffirent levels,her mapping of this fictional universe was never fully realized in her lifetime.After 1941,Marita rarely published her work,but devoted herself to teaching and raising her family.She died of injuries suffered during a fire in her Chicago apartment.