Countee Cullen was an American poet, novelist, translator, children’s writer, and playwright. He is considered one of the most popular black writers in the United States . A very successful literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance.
Biographical summary
Birth and youth
Countee Cullen in his youth
Countee Cullen was born Countee LeRoy Porter on March 30, 1903, but his exact whereabouts are unknown. Some biographers say he was born in Louisville , Kentucky , and others in Baltimore , Maryland , where he was abandoned by his mother, Elizabeth Thomas Lucas, and raised by Mrs. Porter, who was probably his paternal grandmother.
Cullen himself, in his New York University transcript , lists Louisville, Kentucky, as his birthplace. Cullen’s second wife, Ida, and some of his closest friends, including Langston Hughes and Harold Jackman , also stated that Cullen was born in Louisville.
When he was 9, they moved to Harlem (Manhattan) , where Mrs. Porter died and Cullen was adopted in 1918 by the Reverend Frederick A. Cullen and Carolyn Belle (Mitchell) Cullen. He apparently went by the name Countee Porter until 1918. In 1921 he became Countee P. Cullen , and eventually just Countee Cullen, although according to Harold Jackman , Cullen’s adoption was never “official”.
Frederick Cullen was a pioneering black activist minister. He established his Methodist Episcopal Church on a mission upon his arrival in New York City in 1902 and in 1924 moved the Church to the site of a former white church in Harlem. Countee Cullen stated in Caroling Dusk (1927) that he was “brought up in the conservative atmosphere of a Methodist parsonage”, and it is evident that his adoptive father was a particularly strong influence as they were always very close, often traveling together abroad.
He attended De Witt Clinton High School in New York and began writing poetry at the age of fourteen. Cullen was an outstanding student at De Witt Clinton High School (1918–1921). He edited the school newspaper and served on the editorial staff of the literary magazine, Magpie . Here Cullen won his first contest, a citywide competition, with the poem ” I Have a Rendezvous with Life ,” a nonracial poem inspired by Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.”
His literary work
In 1922 Cullen entered New York University where he became a member of the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity . His work appeared in various publications, including The Crisis, the NAACP newspaper edited by W. E. B. Du Bois , and Opportunity , the magazine of the National Urban League .
At New York University ( 1921-1925 ), Cullen wrote most of the poems in his first three volumes: Color ( 1925 ), for which he was admitted to Harvard University (1925-1927 ) , where he earned an M.A. in English and French ; Copper Sun ( 1927 ), highly controversial in the black community because Cullen did not give the subject of race the same attention he had given in Color; and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927), for which he won several awards. Between high school and his graduation from Harvard University, Cullen was the most popular black poet and almost the most popular black writer in America. Cullen was also at the center of one of the great social events of the Harlem Renaissance: On April 9, 1928 , he married Yolande Du Bois , the only daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, in one of the most lavish black weddings in New York. The marriage was disastrous, though, and ended quickly (they divorced in 1930 ) . Cullen remarried in 1940. In 1929 , Cullen published The Black Christ and Other Poems , but it did not receive his usual enthusiastic reviews. He was bitterly disappointed that this collection, the longest and most complicated of his poems, was considered his weakest and least distinguished.
From the 1930s until his death, Cullen wrote much less, partly hampered by his job as a French teacher at Frederick Douglass Junior High . (His most famous student was James Baldwin .) Still, he wrote one significant multi-genre novel: “ One Way to Heaven ,” published in 1934 , which is regarded as one of the most important satires of negroes of the period, and is one of three important retrospectives of Harlem Renaissance fiction
. Cullen’s “ The Medea and Some Other Poems ” (1935) is the first major translation of a classic work by a twentieth-century black American writer . Cullen’s other contributions to children’s literature were “ The Lost Zoo ” and “ Christopher Cat ” (among the most intelligent and engaging books of verse for children), written at a time when there was not much publication in this area by black writers. He also completed—certainly at some of his finest—some of his most darkly complex sonnets.
Death
At the time of his death from high blood pressure and uremic poisoning on January 9, 1946, he was working on a musical with Arna Bontemps called St. Louis Woman (based on Bontemps’ novel “ God Sends Sunday ”)
Contribution to the Harlem Renaissance
He was raised and educated in a predominantly white community, and differed from other Harlem Renaissance poets such as Langston Hughes in that he lacked the background of writing from personal experience of the lives of other blacks or using popular black themes in his writing. He was an imaginative lyric poet, wrote in the tradition of Keats and Shelley , and was resistant to the new poetic techniques of the modernists.
If one event marked the advent of the Harlem Renaissance, it was the precocious success of this rather shy black boy who, more than any other black literary figure of his generation, was being promoted and groomed to become a major literary figure. Here was a black man with a considerable academic background who could write with genuine skill and compelling power, “white” verse , ballads , sonnets , quatrains , etc., much of it in the manner of the British Romantics (though on more than one occasion tinged with racial concerns).
He was certainly not the first “negro” to attempt such verse, but he was the first to do so with such an extensive education and with such a complete understanding of himself as a poet.
If ” I Have a Rendezvous with Life ” was the opening of Cullen’s literary reputation, then the 1924 publication of ” Shrout of Color ” in H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury confirmed the black wonderboy’s arrival as one of the most exciting American poets on the scene.
For many years after his death, Cullen’s reputation was overshadowed by that of other Harlem Renaissance writers, notably Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston , and his work went unpublished, but in recent years there has been a revival of interest in his life and work, and his writings are now being reissued.
Awards
Cullen won more major literary awards than any other black writer of the 1920s:
- First Prize in the Witter Bynner Poetry Competition in 1925,
- John Reed Memorial Prize from Poetry Magazine,
- Amy Spingarn Award from Crisis Magazine,
- Second prize in the first poetry contest of the Oportunidades magazine
- Second prize in the Las Palmas poetry competition.
- Guggenheim Fellowship. (Second black person to win it)
Selected bibliography
Poetry
- Colour (1925)
- Copper Sun (1927)
- My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen (1991)
- On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countee Cullen (1947)
- The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1928)
- The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929)
- The Medea and Some Other Poems (1935)
Prose
- My Lives and How I Lost Them (1942)
- One Way to Heaven (1934)
- The Lost Zoo (1940)
- Christopher Cat
Drama
- Louis Woman (1946)