"Fenton-Johnson (May 71888-September 17 1958)

Was an American poet essayist,author of short stories,editor,and educator.

He was born Elijah & Jesse (Taylor) Johnson.His daddy,Elijah Johnson,was a railroad porter and his family was one the wealthiest African American in Chicago during this time.That is family owned the State Street building in which they lived provides evidence of such financial security.According to a biographical note by Arna Bontemps,Fenton is anecodotally described as being "a dapper boy drove his own electric automobile around Chicago.Growing up,Fenton recounts himself "having scribbed since the age of nine," even despite these indications of a literary inclination,Fenton did not initially plan to embark on a career in letters,and certainly not poetry specifically.
Rather,throughout this childhood,Fenton intended to pursue an office in
the clergy.

The entirirely of Fenton's childhood was spent in Chicago,and he received his secondary education at various secondary public schools in
the city,including Englewood High School and Wenddell Phillips High School.Fenton first began his undergraduate education at Northwestern
University,which he attended from 1908-1909.He went on to complete
his degree at the University of  Chicago.Fenton later received a degree from the Pulitzer School Journalism at Columbia University.

Following his graduation from the University of Chicago,Fenton worked
as a messenger and in the post office before he began to teach English at State University of Louisville,which was a private,black,Baptist-owned institution in Kentucky that would later become Simmons College.He on only taught at the State University of Louisville from 1910-1911,and returned to Chicago in 1911 to concentrate on his literary career.

In 1913,Fenton published his first volume of poetry,A Little Dreaming.
The collection was a self-published work,along with his next two collections,Visions of the Dusk(1915) and Songs of the Soil (1916).Between the release of his first and second collection of poetry,
Fenton moved to New York,where he completed his degree at the Pulitzer School of Journalism with the financial support of a benefactor.

Following the release of his third book of poetry,Fenton moved back to Chicago,where he became of the founding editors of The Champion in 1916.The Champion was formed in conjuction with Henry Bing Dismond,
his cousin,who was also an aspiring poet and popular athlete,one of the few African American college graduates chosen for officer training with
the Army's Eight Illinois Regiment at camp Des Moines in 1918.

The publication focused on African American achievements and was published monthly.Two years after founding The Champion,in 1918,Fenton went on to found The Favorite Magazine,subtitled The World's Greatest Monthly,with Henry.

The Favorite Magazine published a few of Fenton's poems,and around this time his short stories were also published in thr Chrisis.In addition
to the short stories published in the Chrisis,Fenton published his own collection of short stories entitled Tales of Darkness America in 1920.
In the same year,he published a book of essays entitled For the Highest
Good.During this period as well,from about 1912 and following through 1925,Fenton established connections in Chicago with the Harriet Monroe,and several of his poems were accepted for the poetry  magazine poetry.In addition to his work published in Poetry,Fenton also
found publication in the anthology formed by poet Alfred Kreymborg in 1915 called Others: A Magazine of the New Verse.One of his his most famous poems,"Tired," was published in 1919 in Others and it was also
published in The Book of American Negro Poetry in 1922,among other poems of his.Fenton completed or nearly completed fourth collection of
poems entitled African Nights,he did not succeed in publishing the collection.

In addition to his poetry,editing and essay writing,Fenton worked as a playwright.By the age of of nineteen,Fenton plays had been "produced"
on the stage of the old Pekin Theatre,Chicago." In 1925,his play entitled
"The Cabaret Girl" was peformed at the Shadow Theatre in Chicago,the
only peformed play of his on record.

In the 1930s,Fenton for the Federal Writers' Project,which was part of Works Progress Administration (WPA) in Chicago.Directed by Arna Bontemps,the Federal Writers' Project focused on writing about the African American experience in in Illinois.Arna acted as Fenton's literary executor,additionally.

Fenton has had a consistent presence in anthologies beginning with the
Book of  American Negro Poetry,Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin's The New Poetry: Anthology of Twentieth Century Verse in English (1923) and Countee Cullen's Caroling Dusk (1927).

The poetry of Fenton Johnson has often been by critics to be characterized by great irony and a kind of hopelessness resulting from an embattled African American experience.In his introduction to Fenton in The Book of American Negro Poetry,James Weldon Johnson writes that in many of Fenton's poems,"there is nothing left to fight or even hope for." Yet James Weldon Johnson continues,"these poems of despair possess tremendous power and constitute Fenton Johnson's best work." Fenton Johnson is often seen as a poet who possesses a particularly fatalistic perspective branching from his experience as an African America,and this type of embittered poetry is what what is he known for.

Also in his introduction,James Weldon Johnson makes a few claims about Fenton's earlier works, finding that his first book of poetry, A Little Dreaming,"was without marked distinction.

James Weldon Johnson also indicates in his introduction to Fenton that it was during the war period that Fenton adopted free verse,and "broke
away from all traditions and ideas of Negro Poetry.This new found "formlessness,"Fenton found,"voiced the disillusionment and bitterness
of feeling the Negro race was then experiencing.For James Weldon Johnson,then,Fenton Johnson's poetry became associated with despair,
such was how Fenton became framed within the larger The Book of the American Negro Poetry project,and subsequently in other anthologies.
This "bitter" Fenton is particularly encapsulated in the lines of his poem
"tired." "I am tired of work.I am tired of building up somebody else's civilization," the poem reads.

Fenton has a particularly legacy within American Modernist poetry.He is
noted to have been a part of writers who would become the makers of a
"new poetry,which sought to "throw over the traditions of American Poetry," as James Weldon Johnson would describe it.These "new" poems appeared in Poetry,Others and later,The Liberator,and they marked a progressive from " commonplace traditionalism to the most revolutionary naturalism,from the rhymed,carefully scanned line to free
verse,from conventionalized Negro dialect to the brawny language of Sandberg's Chicago poems.

While "Tired" has been frequently anthologized,Fenton's earlier poems
were made in more "conventional modes," including dialect poetry,as found in first book,A Little Dreaming.The collection considered a wide range of topics,from a poem on Paul Laurence Dunbar,entitled "Dunbar," to medieval themes such as in "Lancelot's Defiance.Additionally,A Little Dreaming contains a customary Scottish poem,Irish poem,and even Yiddish poem,which points to a whole range
of poetic influences during the early part of his poetic career.In Visions of the Dusk and Songs of the Soil,Fenton begins incorporate "Negro spirituals," and here the transition into themes more heavily influenced by the African American experience might be observed.In Songs of the Soi,Fenton writes that " The Negro has a history,and and it is something
more than a peasant.Transitioning from here to the poem "Tired," we might find the "black revolutionary poet" that James Weldon Johnson proclaims Fenton Johnson to be and how many perceive him today.

Fenton was married to Cecilia Rhone.He was a member of the Authors League of America and of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.