COUNTEE CULLEN 

Countee Cullen was considered an important poet of the “Negro Awakening.”  Born in May 1903, little is known of his father and  mother or of his early years in New York.  He lived with his maternal mother until he was thirteen and was then adopted by  the Reverend Frederick A.Cullen, minister of  the Salem African Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem.  Cullen attended De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx and New York University.  He developed early as a poet, “I Have a Rendezvous with Life,” “The Ballad of the Brown Girl,” and “The Shroud of Color" are poems that Cullen included in Color (1925), his first book of verse, published the same year that he graduated from NYU.  The young writer also served as an assistant editor of Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, edited by Charles S. Johnson, the well-known Negro sociologist.  Through his position on Opportunity, Cullen came to know the important writers of the Negro Awakening: Langston Hughes, Zora N. Hurston, Eric Walrond, E. Franklin Frazier, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps, and Sterling Brown.  In 1927 the poet published two other volumes of verse - Copper Sun and The Ballad of the Brown  Girl - and edited an anthology of Negro poetry, Caroling Dusk.  By 1928 he was the recipient of the Guggenheim fellowship and decide to study in Paris.  Before leaving, however, he became engaged to Nina Yolande DuBois, daughter of W. E. B. DuBois.  The couple was married later that year but divorced a year later. Cullen lived in Paris for two years and like Richard Wright and James Baldwin experienced relatively little racial discrimination there.  He was able to finish a long narrative poem, “The Black Christ,” which he published together with other poems in 1929.   In addition to his writing, Cullen taught in the New York City Public Schools from 1929 until his death.  While teaching, he went on to publish several volumes of verse: The Medea and Other Poems (1935); The Lost Zoo (1940), a children’s book; and My Nine Lives and How I Lost Them (1942); a novel, One Way to Heaven (1932), which is a satire of elite Negroes in Harlem; and a musical play, St.Louis Woman, which he co-wrote with Arna Bontemps.  Cullen was not without his critics.  One said that his writing suggests the “agony of being black in America” without quite making the reader experience it.