Arna Wendell Bontemps ( bon-TOM) (October 13, 1902 – June 4, 1973) was an American poet, novelist and librarian, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance.
Bontemps was born in 1902 in Alexandria, Louisiana, into a Louisiana Creole family. His ancestors included free people of color and French colonists. His father was a contractor and sometimes would take his son to construction sites. As the boy got older, his father would take him along to speak-easies at night that featured jazz. His mother, Maria Carolina Pembroke, was a schoolteacher. The family was Catholic, and Bontemps was baptized at St. Francis Xavier Cathedral.
When Bontemps 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.
Following his graduation, Bontemps met and befriended the author Wallace Thurman, founder of Fire!! magazine, in his job at Los Angeles Post Office. Bontemps later traveled to New York City, where he settled and became part of the Harlem Renaissance.
In August 1924, at the age of 22, Bontemps published his first poem, "Hope" (originally called "A Record of the Darker Races"), in The Crisis, official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He depicted hope as an "empty bark" drifting meaninglessly with no purpose, referring to his confusion about his career. Bontemps, along with many other West Coast intellectuals, traveled to New York during the Harlem Renaissance.
After graduation, he moved to New York in 1924 to teach at the Harlem Academy (present-day Northeastern Academy) in New York City. While teaching, Bontemps continued to write and publish poetry. In both 1926 and 1927, he received the Alexander Pushkin Prize of Opportunity, an academic journal published by the National Urban League. In 1926 he won the Crisis Poetry Prize.
In New York, Bontemps met other writers who became lifelong friends, including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay and Jean Toomer. Hughes became a role model, collaborator, and dear friend to Bontemps.
In 1926 Bontemps married Alberta Johnson, with whom he had six children. From oldest to youngest they were: Joan (who married Avon Williams), Paul, Poppy, Camille, Connie and Alex. In 1931, he left New York and his teaching position at the Harlem Academy as the Great Depression deepened. He and his family moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where he had a teaching position at Oakwood Junior College for three years.
In the early 1930s, Bontemps began to publish fiction, in addition to more poetry. He received a considerable amount of attention for his first novel, God Sends Sunday (1931). This novel explored the story of an African-American jockey named Little Augie who easily earns money and 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, Du Bois viewed it as "sordid" and equated it with other "decadent" novels of the Harlem Renaissance. Later in his career, Bontemps collaborated with Countee Cullen to create a dramatic adaptation of the novel, which was published in 1946 as St. Louis Woman.
Bontemps also began to write several children's books. In 1932, he collaborated with 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.
During the early 1930s, African-American writers and intellectuals were discriminated against in Northern Alabama. Thirty miles from Huntsville in Decatur, the Scottsboro boys, nine African Americans, were charged with rape of two white women and being prosecuted in a case that became renowned for racial injustice. During this time, Bontemps had many friends visit and stay with him while they came to Alabama to protest this trial. The school administration was worried about his many out-of-state visitors.
In later years, Bontemps said that the administration at Oakwood Junior College had demanded he burn many of his private books to demonstrate that he had given up radical politics. Bontemps refused to do so. He resigned from his teaching position and returned with his family to California in 1934.
In 1936 Bontemps published what is considered by some as his best work, Black Thunder. This novel explores a slave rebellion that took place in 1800 near Richmond, Virginia, led by Gabriel Prosser, an uneducated, enslaved field worker and coachman. It describes Prosser's attempt to conduct a slave army to raid an armory in Richmond, in order to defend themselves against any assailants. A fellow slave betrayed Prosser, causing the rebellion to be shut down. Prosser was captured by whites and lynched. In Bontemps' version, whites were compelled to admit that slaves were humans who had possibilities of a promising life.
Black Thunder received many extraordinary reviews by both African-American and mainstream journals, for example, the Saturday Review of Literature. Despite these rave reviews, in the midst of the Depression, Bontemps did not earn enough from sales of the novel to support his family in Chicago, where he had moved with them shortly before publishing the book. He briefly taught in Chicago at the Shiloh Academy but did not stay at the school long, leaving for a job with the Illinois Writers' Project (IWP), under the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA).
The Works Progress Administration (WPA) hired writers to produce histories of states and major cities. The Illinois Project was one of the most successful state projects; it employed numerous noted writers. The project work helped them survive economically, and most also worked on their own writing. Bontemps, in addition to other work for the IWP, oversaw such young writers as Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Katherine Dunham, Fenton Johnson, Frank Yerby, Richard Durham, Kitty Chapelle, and Robert Lucas, in creating the Cavalcade of the American Negro and other works. They created part of what became a massive collection of writings on the "Negro in Illinois".
In 1938, following the publication of his children's book Sad-Faced Boy (1937), Bontemps was granted a Rosenwald fellowship to work on his novel, Drums at Dusk (1939). This was based on Toussaint L'Ouverture's slave rebellion in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (which became the independent republic of Haiti). This book received wider recognition than his other novels. Some critics viewed the plot as overdramatic, while others commended its characterizations.
Bontemps struggled to make enough from his books to support his family. He was dismayed to gain little professional acknowledgement for his work despite being a prolific writer. He became 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.