Harlem Renaissance Author Bontemps Signed book BLACK THUNDER African Amercsan

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Harlem Renaissance Author Bontemps Signed book BLACK THUNDER African Amercsan:
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Black Thunder by Harlem Renaissance author Arna Bontemps signed and beautifully inscribed in 1972 in ink \'For Bob remembering Chicago and all the years between - All good wishes - Arna 11-4-72\'. 4th printing August 1970 softback..Like his close friend Langston Hughes and their fellow writers in the Harlem Renaissance, Arna Bontemps explored African-American experience in a wide variety of genres. As a poet, novelist, historian, anthologist and archivist, he enriched and preserved black cultural heritage.Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, but moved with his family to Los Angeles at age three. After graduating in 1923 from Pacific Union College, he took a teaching job in the Harlem section of New York City, where he became part of a group of African-American literary artists and scholars whose innovative work was beginning to attract attention. Here Bontemps won poetry prizes from The Crisis and Opportunity, as well as journals dedicated to the dawning “renaissance,” and began his lifelong friendship with Hughes.In 1926 he married Alberta Johnson, who would bear him six children, and in 1931, as the Depression worsened, he accepted a post at Oakwood Junior College in Huntsville, Alabama. In that year, too, Bontemps published his first book, God Sends Sunday, a novel about a St. Louis jockey. More permanent and gratifying employment came in 1946, when he was named Head Librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee; here he oversaw the expansion of one of the greatest archives of African-American cultural material, meanwhile writing books on everything from slave rebellions to the college’s famous Jubilee singers.Although Bontemps had begun as a poet, his many interests and the needs of his growing family led him to other areas—he even wrote children’s books to “reach young readers not yet hardened or grown insensitive to man’s inhumanity to man.” But in the 1960s the Black Arts movement inspired a return to his poetry, and in 1963 he published a volume of verse, Personals.Bontemp’s poems are marked by a concern for the values of endurance and dignity— themes he treats in conservative forms even as he expresses his rage at injustice. They also reflect his immersion in the musical and oral traditions of African Americans. He has much in common with Hughes and Countee Cullen, as with the later poets Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks.
Important WorksGod Sends Sunday (1931)Black Thunder (1936—historical novel)Personals (1963; 3rd ed., 1973)The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972)The Old South (1973—collected short fiction)RecordingsArna Wendell Bontemps Reading His Poems with Comment at Radio Station WPLN, Nashville Public Library, May 22, 1963. [sound recording] Library of Congress. Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature.Anthology of Negro Poets in the U.S.A.: 200 Years. Folkways Records FP 91-2, 1955.An Anthology of African American Poetry for Young People. Cassette or CD; Smithsonian Folkways, 45044, 1990.
Arna Wendell Bontemps was born on October 13, 1902, in Alexandria, Louisiana, the son of a Creole bricklayer and schoolteacher. At age three he and his family moved to Los Angeles after his father was threatened by two drunk white men. Bontemps grew up in California and was sent to the San Fernando Academy boarding school with his father’s instruction to not “go up there acting colored.” This Bontemps later noted as a formative moment, and he would resent what he saw as an effort to make him forget his heritage. He graduated from Pacific Union College in Angwin in 1923 with an AB.In 1924 he accepted a teaching position in Harlem, New York. He married Alberta Johnson, a former student, in 1926; they would eventually have six children. Though his original plan was to obtain his PhD in English, he accepted teaching positions to support his family. Luckily, it was while teaching in Harlem that he would become closely connected to the Harlem Renaissance and befriend major artists such as Countee Cullen, W. E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and especially Langston Hughes, with whom he frequently collaborated.Bontemps first published his poems in Crisis in 1924, and also later in Opportunity, both literary magazines that supported the work of young African American writers. In 1926 and 1927 Bontemps win three prizes for his poetry from these publications. His first book of fiction was God Sends Sunday (1931), the story of a fast-living black jockey named Little Augie. The book received mixed reviews: praise for its significance as a book by a black author but also criticism for its emphasis on the seamier side of black life.That same year Bontemps moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where he had accepted a position at Oakwood Junior College. In 1932 he received another prize for the short story “A Summer Tragedy” and published his first two children’s book, Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti, with Langston Hughes, and You Can’t Pet a Possum in 1934. He began work on Black Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt: Virginia 1800, the story of an aborted slave rebellion led by Gabriel Prosser. The novel, published in 1936, was finished in his father’s California house. At the end of the 1934 school year Oakwood dismissed Bontemps, a reaction to the combination of his radical politics, out-of-state visitors, his personal book collection, and the school’s own conservative and religious views.In 1943 Bontemps received a master’s degree in library science from the University of Chicago. He was appointed a librarian at Fisk University, a position he held until his retirement in 1965, followed by honorary degrees and professorships at the University of Illinois and Yale University, and a return to Fisk as a writer in residence.He died June 4, 1973, from a heart attack, while working on his autobiography. Though Sterling A. Brown and Aaron Douglas noted that his writings have not received the critical attention deserved, his work as a librarian and historian point to him as a great chronicler and a preserver of the documents of black cultural heritage. His family’s old Louisiana home is now the Arna Bontemps African American Museum and Cultural Arts Center.A Selected BibliographyPoetryPersonals (1963)AnthologyAmerican Negro Poetry (1963)
Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Reader (1941)
Hold Fast to Dreams (1969)
The Book of Negro Folklore (1959)
The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972)
The Poetry of the Negro (1949)Auto/BiographyFather of the Blues (1941)FictionBlack Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt: Virginia 1800 (1936)
Chariot in the Cloud (1929)
Drums at Dusk: A Novel (1939)
God Sends Sunday (1931)
Sad-Faced Boy (1937)
The Old South (1973)For ChildrenPopo and Fifina: Children of Haiti (1932)
The Fast Sooner Hound (1942)
You Can’t Pet a Possum (1934)Nonfiction100 Years of Negro Freedom (1961)
Great Slave Narratives (1969)
The Story of the Negro (1948)
They Seek a City (1945)
Arnaud \"Arna\" Wendell Bontemps (October 13, 1902 – June 4, 1973)[1] was an American poet, novelist and librarian, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance.Contents 1 Early life
2 Career
3 Later years
4 Legacy and honors
5 Works
6 Recorded works
7 Notes
8 Further reading
9 External linksEarly lifeBontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, into a Louisiana Creole family. His father, Paul Bismark Bontemps, worked as a bricklayer; his mother, Maria Carolina Pembroke, as a schoolteacher.[2] When he was three years old, his family moved to Los Angeles, California in the Great Migration of blacks out of the South and into cities of the North, Midwest and West. They settled in what became known as the Watts district.After attending public schools, Bontemps attended Pacific Union College in Angwin, California, where he graduated in 1923. He majored in English and minored in history, and he was also a member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity.
CareerAlong with many other West Coast Intellectuals, Bontemps was drawn to New York during the Harlem Renaissance.[2] After graduation, he moved to New York to teach at the Harlem Academy in 1924. While he was teaching, Bontemps began to publish poetry. In both 1926 and 1927, he received the Alexander Pushkin Prize of Opportunity, a National Urban League published journal. And in 1926 he won the Crisis Poetry Prize, which was an official journal of the NAACP.[2]In New York, Bontemps met many lifelong friends including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay and Jean Toomer.[2] Hughes became a role model, collaborator, and dear friend to Bontemps.[3]Bontemps was married in 1926 to Alberta Johnson, with whom he had six children. In 1931, he left New York and his teaching position at the Harlem Academy as the Great Depression got severely worse. He and his family moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where he had a teaching position at the Oakwood Junior College for three years.[2]In the early 1930s, Bontemps expanded his writing as he began to publish fiction, in addition to more poetry.[2] He received a considerable amount of attention for his first novel, God Sends Sunday (1931). This novel was a quintessential writing piece of the Harlem Renaissance movement. It followed the story of an African-American jockey named Little Augie who effortlessly earns money and then 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 Bontemps received for this novel, 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 appreciated this basic story enough that he collaborated with Countee Cullen to create a dramatic adaption of the novel. Together in 1946 they published this adaption of the book titled \"St. Louis Woman\".[2]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.[2]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. Bontemps’ constant out-of-state visitors drew concerns with the school administration. In later years, Bontemps professed that the administration at the Oakwood Junior College demanded he burn many of his private books in order to indicate his relinquishing radical politics. Bontemps refused to do so. He resigned from his teaching position and move back to California with his family in 1934.[2]In 1936 Bontemps published what is known 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, and Prosser to be lynched. However, in Bontemps version of the story, whites were compelled to admit that slaves were humans that had possibilities of a promising life.[2]Black Thunder received many extraordinary reviews by both African-American and conventional journals, for example, the Saturday Review of Literature. Despite these rave reviews of this literary piece, the earnings were unable to sufficiently support his family in Chicago, where they moved shortly before he published the novel. He briefly taught in Chicago at the Shiloh Academy but did not stay long because he took a job with the WPA Illinois Writers’ Project. In 1938, following the publication of another children’s book Sad-Faced Boy (1937), Bontemps acquired a Rosenwald fellowship to work on his novel, Drums at Dusk (1939), which was based on Toussaint L’Ouverture\'s Haitian rebellion. This book was more widely recognized than his other novels. Critics were split as some viewed the plot as overdramatic, while others commended its characterizations.[2]Bontemps struggled to make enough from his books to support his family. However, more importantly, he gained little acknowledgement for his work despite being a prolific writer. This caused him to quickly 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.[2]He returned to graduate school and earned a master\'s degree in library science from the University of Chicago in 1943. Bontemps 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. He was initiated as a member of the Zeta Rho Chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia Fraternity at Fisk in 1954. Bontemps stayed at Fisk until 1964 and would continue to return occasionally.[2]
Later yearsAfter retiring from Fisk University in 1966, Bontemps worked at the University of Illinois (Chicago Circle). He later moved to Yale University, where he served as curator of the James Weldon Johnson Collection.[4]During this time, Bontemps published numerous novels varying in genre. Slappy Hooper (1946), and Sam Patch (1951) were two children’s books that he co wrote with Jack Conroy. Individually he published Lonesome Boy (1955) and Mr. Kelso’s Lion (1970), two other children’s books. Simultaneously he was writing pieces targeted for teenagers, including biographies on George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. His other pieces of this time were Golden Slippers (1941), \"Story of the Negro\" (1948), Chariot in the Sky (1951) and Famous Negro Athletes (1964) (Fleming). Critics highly praised his Story of the Negro, which received the Jane Addams Children\'s Book Award and was a Newbery Honor Book.Bontemps worked with Langston Hughes on pieces geared toward adults. They edited The Poetry of the Negro (1949) and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958). He collaborated with Conroy and wrote a history of the migration of African-Americans in the United States called They Seek a City (1945). They later revised and published it as Anyplace But Here (1966). Bontemps also wrote 100 Years of Negro Freedom (1961) and edited Great Slave Narratives (1969) and The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972). In addition he was also able to edit American Negro Poetry (1963), which was a popular anthology. He compiled his poetry in Personals (1963) and also wrote an introduction for a previous novel, Black Thunder, when it was republished in 1968.[2]Bontemps died on June 4, 1973, at his home in Nashville, from a myocardial infarction (heart attack), while working on his collection of short fiction in The Old South (1973).[2]Through his librarianship and bibliographic work, Bontemps became a leading figure in establishing African-American literature as a legitimate object of study and preservation.[5] His work as a poet, novelist, children’s writer, editor, librarian and historian helped shape modern African-American literature, but it also had a tremendous influence on African-American culture.[2]
Legacy and honors
The Arna Bontemps African American Museum is located downtown in his native Alexandria, Louisiana. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante included Arna Bontemps on his list of the 100 Greatest African Americans.[6]Works God Sends Sunday: A Novel (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1931; New York: Washington Square Press, 2005)
Popo and Fifina, Children of Haiti, by Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1932; Oxford University Press, 2000)
You Can’t Pet a Possum (New York: William Morrow, 1934)
Black Thunder: Gabriel\'s Revolt: Virginia 1800 (New York: Macmillan, 1936; reprinted with intro. Arnold Rampersad, Boston: Beacon Press, 1992)
Sad-Faced Boy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937)
Drums at Dusk: A Novel (New York: Macmillan, 1939; reprinted Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8071-3439-9)
Golden Slippers: an Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers, compiled by Arna Bontemps (New York: Harper & Row, 1941)
The Fast Sooner Hound, by Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942)
They Seek a City (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1945)
We Have Tomorrow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1945)
Slappy Hooper, the Wonderful Sign Painter, by Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946)
Story of the Negro, (New York: Knopf, 1948; New York: Random House, 1963)
The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949: an anthology, edited by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1949)
George Washington Carver (Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson, 1950)
Father of the Blues: an Autobiography, W.C. Handy, ed. Arna Bontemps (New York: Macmillan, 1941, 1957; Da Capo Press, 1991)
Chariot in the Sky: a Story of the Jubilee Singers (Philadelphia: Winston, 1951; London: Paul Breman, 1963; Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)
Lonesome Boy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955; Beacon Press, 1988)
Famous Negro Athletes (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1964)
Great Slave Narratives (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969)
Hold Fast to Dreams: Poems Old and New Selected by Arna Bontemps (Chicago: Follett, 1969)
Mr. Kelso’s Lion (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970)
Free at Last: the Life of Frederick Douglass (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1971; Apollo Editions, 2000)
The Harlem Renaissance Remembered: Essays, Edited, With a Memoir (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972, 1984)
Young Booker: Booker T. Washington’s Early Days (New York, Dodd, Mead, 1972)
The Old South: \"A Summer Tragedy\" and Other Stories of the Thirties (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1973)Recorded works In the Beginning: Bible Stories for Children by Sholem Asch (Folkways Records, 1955)
Joseph and His Brothers: From In the Beginning by Sholem Asch (Folkways Records, 1955)
Anthology of Negro Poets in the U.S.A. - 200 Years (Folkways Records, 1955)
An Anthology of African American Poetry for Young People (Folkways Records, 1990)Born in Alexandria, Louisiana, the first child of a Roman Catholic bricklayer and a Methodist schoolteacher, Arna Wendell Bontemps grew up in California and graduated from Pacific Union College. After college he accepted a teaching position in Harlem at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, and in 1926 and 1927 won first prizes on three separate occasions in contests with other \"New Negro\" poets. The same years marked his marriage to Alberta Johnson and the start of a family of six children.Bontemps\'s first effort at a novel (Chariot in the Cloud, 1929), a bildungsroman set in southern California, never found a publisher, but by mid-1931, as his teaching position in New York City ended, Harcourt accepted God Sends Sunday (1931), his novel about the rise and notoriety of Little Augie. This tiny black jockey of the 1890s, whose period of great luck went sour, was inspired by Bontemps\'s favorite uncle, Buddy.While teaching at Oakwood Junior College, Bontemps began the first of several collaborations with Langston Hughes, Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti (1932), a colorful travel book for juveniles that portrays two black children who migrate with their parents from an inland farm to a busy fishing village. The success of this new genre encouraged him to make juvenile fiction an ongoing part of his repertoire.Residence in the Deep South proved fruitful for his career, for in quick succession he published his best-known short story, \"A Summer Tragedy\" (1932), the compelling narrative of a simple yet dignified couple worn weary by a lifetime of sharecropping on a southern plantation, wrote a dozen other tales of the South that were compiled years later under the title The Old South (1973); completed yet another profitable juvenile book, You Can\'t Pet a Possum (1934), for its time a charming rural Alabama story about an eight-year-old named Shine Boy and his yellow hound, Butch; initiated contact with composer and musician W. C. Handy to ghostwrite Handy\'s autobiography; and, in a visit to Fisk University in Nashville, \"discovered\" its rich and seemingly forgotten repository of narratives by former slaves.Late in 1932 Bontemps started writing Black Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt: Virginia 1800 (1936), his singular and inspired representation of an actual slave insurrection that failed because of weather and treachery. This work establishes the concept of freedom as the principal motif of his ensuing works and evokes questions regarding differences between writing and orality as racial and cultural markets. But because be was forced out of Oakwood at the end of the 1934 school year, the novel was completed in the cramped space of his father\'s California home, where the family had retreated.Ironic relief arrived a year later from the Adventists in the form of a principalship at their Shiloh Academy on Chicago\'s battered South Side. The venture was bright with promise because the city and the university had attracted a young and savvy coterie of social radicals including Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, and Jack Conroy. Favorable critical reception of Black Thunder assured Bontemps\'s celebrity among the group, and his application to the Julian Rosenwald Fund to research and write a third novel met with success. In Sad-Faced Boy (1937), he relates the travels to Harlem of three quaint Alabama boys who in time nostalgically discover the charm of their own birthplace. In 1938 he secured an appointment as editorial supervisor to the Federal Writers\' Project of the Illinois WPA. He sailed for the Caribbean in the fall of 1938 and put the finishing touches on Drums at Dusk (1939), his historical portrayal of the celebrated eighteenth-century black revolution on the island of Santo Domingo.With great relief he completed Father of the Blues (1941), the \"autobiography\" commissioned by the ever-testy W. C. Handy; he edited his first compilation, Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers (1941); he then published a humorous American tall tale for children co-authored with his WPA colleague Jack Conroy titled The Fast Sooner Hound (1942); he was awarded two additional Rosenwald grants to pursue a degree and to write a book on \"the Negro in Illinois\"; and in 1943 he completed a master\'s degree in library science at the University of Chicago, clearing the way to his appointment as librarian at Fisk University.In 1946 the controversial musical based on his first novel reached Broadway as St. Louis Woman for a short but successful run. Arguably his most distinguished work of the decade was The Story of the Negro (1948), a race history since Egyptian civilization that won him the Jane Addams Children\'s Book Award for 1956. Then, with Langston Hughes, he edited The Poetry of the Negro (1949), a comprehensive collection of poems by blacks and tributary poems by nonblacks.An assortment of histories and biographies, largely written with youths in mind, emerged from Fisk throughout the 1950s and the succeeding civil rights years. Bontemps and Hughes\'s collaboration produced two anthologies during this period, The Book of Negro Folklore (1959) and American Negro Poetry (1963).After Hughes\'s death in 1967, Bontemps compiled Hold Fast to Dreams (1969), a montage of poems by black and white writers. But compilations of a more personal sort rounded off his long career. They include The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972), featuring an introductory reflection by Bontemps and twelve critical essays on literary figures from the era; Personals (1963), a collection of his own poems reissued in 1973 as a third edition with a prefatory personal history; and The Old South: \"A Summer Tragedy\" and Other Stories of the Thirties (1973), which opens with the personal essay \"Why I Returned,\" places most of his short fiction under a single cover.Retirement from Fisk in 1966 brought recognition in the form of two honorary degrees and distinguished professorial appointments at the University of Illinois (Chicago Circle), Yale University, and back at Fisk as writer in residence. Following his death in 1973, early estimates of his career from Sterling A. Brown and Aaron Douglas noted that he deserves to be known much better than he has been. Aptly, the Yale appointment included the title or Curator or the James Weldon Johnson Collection at the Beinecke Library, for prevalent views have come to regard him as a chronicler and keeper of black cultural heritage. It is worth noting that the vast and unique body of extant correspondence with his friend Langston Hughes is housed in this archive. Bontemps\'s most distinctive works are ringing affirmations of the human passion for freedom and the desire for social justice inherent in us all. Arnold Rampersad called him the conscience of his era and it could be fairly added that his tendency to fuse history and imagination represents his personal legacy to a collective memory.See also: Charles H. Nichols, ed., Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters, 1925-1967, 1988. Kirkland C. Jones, Renaissance Man from Louisiana: A Biography of Arna Wendell Bontemps, 1992. Eric J. Sundquist, The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction, 1992. Charles L. James, \"Arna W. Bontemps\' Creole Hetitage,\" Syracuse University Library Associates Courier 30 (1995): 91-115. From The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Ed. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Oxford University Press.Robert E. FlemingBontemps, Arna Wendell (13 Oct. 1902-4 June 1973), writer, was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, the son of Paul Bismark Bontemps, a bricklayer, and Maria Carolina Pembroke, a schoolteacher. He was reared in Los Angeles, where his family moved when he was three. He graduated from Pacific Union College in Angwin, California, in 1923.Bontemps then moved to New York\'s Harlem, where the \"Harlem Renaissance\" had already attracted the attention of West Coast intellectuals. He found a teaching job at the Harlem Academy in 1924 and began to publish poetry. He won the Alexander Pushkin Prize of Opportunity, a journal published by the National Urban League, in 1926 and 1927 and the Crisis (official journal of the NAACP) Poetry Prize in 1926. His career soon intersected that of the poet Langston Hughes, with whom he became a close friend and sometime collaborator. In Harlem Bontemps also came to know Countée Cullen, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer.In 1926 Bontemps married Alberta Johnson; they had six children. In 1931, as the depression deepened, Bontemps left the Harlem Academy and moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where he taught for three years at Oakwood Junior College. By the early 1930s Bontemps had begun to publish fiction as well as poetry. His first novel, God Sends Sunday, was published in 1931, and an early short story, \"A Summer Tragedy,\" won the Opportunity Short Story Prize in 1932. God Sends Sunday is typical of the Harlem Renaissance movement. Little Augie, a black jockey, earns money easily and spends it recklessly. When his luck as a jockey runs out, he drifts through the black sporting world. Slight in plot, the novel is most appreciated for its poetic style, its re-creation of the black idiom, and the depth of its characterization. While most reviewers praised it, W. E. B. Du Bois found it \"sordid\" and compared it with other \"decadent\" books of the Harlem Renaissance such as Carl Van Vechten\'s Nigger Heaven (1926) and Claude McKay\'s Home to Harlem (1928). But Bontemps thought enough of the basic story to collaborate with Countee Cullen on St. Louis Woman (1946), a dramatic adaptation of the book.Bontemps\'s next novel would be on a much more serious theme, but he first attempted another genre. In collaboration with Langston Hughes, he wrote Popo and Fifina (1932), the first of his many children\'s books. A travel book for children, it introduced readers to Haitian life by describing the lives of a boy named Popo and his sister Fifina. Bontemps followed his initial success in the new field with You Can\'t Pet a Possum (1934), a story of a boy and his dog in rural Alabama.Northern Alabama in the early 1930s proved to be inhospitable to an African-American writer and intellectual. The Scottsboro boys were being tried at Decatur, just thirty miles from Huntsville. Friends visited Bontemps on their way to protest the trial, and a combination of his out-of-state visitors and the fact that he was ordering books by mail worried the administration of the school. Bontemps claimed in later years that he was ordered to demonstrate his break with the world of radical politics by burning a number of books from his private library--works by James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Frederick Douglass. Bontemps refused. Instead he resigned and moved back to California, where he and his family moved in with his parents.In 1936 he published Black Thunder, his finest work in any genre. Based on historical research, Black Thunder tells the story of Gabriel Prosser\'s rebellion near Richmond, Virginia, in 1800. Gabriel, an uneducated field worker and coachman, planned to lead a slave army equipped with makeshift weapons on a raid against the armory in Richmond. Once armed with real muskets, the rebels would defend themselves against all attackers. Betrayed by another slave and hampered by a freak storm, the rebels were crushed, and Gabriel was hanged, but in Bontemps\'s version of the affair, whites won a Pyrrhic victory. They were forced to recognize the human potential of slaves.Although Black Thunder was well reviewed by both black and mainstream journals such as the Saturday Review of Literature, the royalties were not sufficient to support Bontemps\'s family in Chicago, where they had moved just before publication. He taught briefly in Chicago at the Shiloh Academy and then accepted a job with the WPA Illinois Writers\' Project. In 1938, after publishing another children\'s book, Sad-Faced Boy (1937), he received a Rosenwald fellowship to work on what became his last novel, Drums at Dusk (1939), based on the Haitian rebellion led by Toussaint L\'Ouverture. Although the book was more widely reviewed than his previous novels, the critics were divided, some seeing it as suffering from a sensational and melodramatic plot, others praising its characterizations.The disappointing reception of the book and the poor royalties that it earned convinced Bontemps that \"it was fruitless for a Negro in the United States to address serious writing to my generation, and . . . to consider the alternative of trying to reach young readers not yet hardened or grown insensitive to man\'s inhumanity to man\" (1968, p. x). Henceforth, Bontemps addressed most of his books to youthful audiences. The Fast Sooner Hound (1942), was written in collaboration with Jack Conroy, whom he had met on the Illinois Writers\' Project.In 1943 Bontemps earned his master\'s degree in library science from the University of Chicago. The necessity of earning a living then took him to Fisk University, where he became head librarian, a post he held until 1964. Thereafter he returned to Fisk from time to time. He also accepted positions at the Chicago Circle campus of the University of Illinois and at Yale University, where he served as curator of the James Weldon Johnson Collection of Negro Arts and Letters.During these years Bontemps produced an astonishing variety and number of books. His children\'s books included Slappy Hooper (1946) and Sam Patch (1951), which he wrote in collaboration with Conroy, as well as Lonesome Boy (1955) and Mr. Kelso\'s Lion (1970). At the same time, he wrote biographies of George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington for teenage readers; Golden Slippers (1941), an anthology of poetry for young readers; Famous Negro Athletes (1964); Chariot in the Sky (1951), the story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers; and The Story of the Negro (1948).For adults, he and Hughes edited The Poetry of the Negro (1949) and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958). With Conroy he wrote They Seek a City (1945), a history of African-American migration in the United States, which they revised and published in 1966 as Anyplace But Here. Bontemps\'s historical interests also led him to write 100 Years of Negro Freedom (1961) and to edit Great Slave Narratives (1969) and The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972). He also edited a popular anthology, American Negro Poetry (1963), just in time for the black reawakening of the 1960s.Bontemps had been forced by the reception of his work to put his more creative writing on hold after 1939, but the 1960s encouraged him to return to it. He collected his poetry in a slim volume, Personals (1963), and wrote an introduction for Black Thunder when it was republished in 1968 in a paperback edition. At the time of his death, he was completing the collection of his short fiction in The Old South (1973). Bontemps died at his home in Nashville.Arna Bontemps excelled in no single literary genre. A noteworthy poet, he published only one volume of his verse. As a writer of fiction, he is best known for a single novel, written in midcareer and rediscovered in his old age. Yet the impact of his work as poet, novelist, historian, children\'s writer, editor, and librarian is far greater than the sum of its parts. He played a major role in shaping modern African-American literature and had a wide-ranging influence on African-American culture of the latter half of the twentieth century.BibliographyThe major collections of Arna Bontemps\'s papers are at Fisk University; the George Arents Research Library, Syracuse University; and the James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, Yale University. No book-length biography exists, but Bontemps wrote several autobiographical essays: Introduction to Black Thunder (1968), Preface to Personals (1963), and \"Why I Returned,\" in The Old South (1973). An interview appears in John O\'Brien, Interviews with Black Writers (1973). A bibliography is Robert E. Fleming, James Weldon Johnson and Arna Wendell Bontemps: A Reference Guide (1978). See also Minrose C. Gwin, \"Arna Bontemps,\" American Poets, 1880-1945 (1986), and Kirkland C. Jones, \"Arna Bontemps,\" Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940 (1987).