Countée Cullen

Writer

• Born: May 30, 1903
• Birthplace: New York, New York or Louisville, Kentucky or Baltimore, Maryland
• Died: January 9, 1946
• Place of death: New York, New York

Perhaps best known for his poems addressing the racial issues of his time, Cullen was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. In addition to his own writing, he helped to promote the work of other black writers. He also wrote drama and children’s literature.

Early Life

Countée Cullen (KOWN-tee KUH-lihn) was born Countée LeRoy Porter on May 30, 1903. Because of his reticence on personal matters, some details of his life are unclear. He might have been abandoned by his parents at birth. When Cullen was nine, he was brought to New York and raised until he was eleven by a Mrs. Porter, thought to be his paternal grandmother. When she died in 1918, Cullen was unofficially adopted by Frederick Ashbury Cullen, a minister at the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem. Cullen’s adoptive father would later head the Harlem chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It is believed that Cullen’s birth mother did not try to contact him until Cullen had become well known in the 1920’s.

Cullen began writing poetry as a young boy and won a citywide poetry contest, resulting in his poetry being widely printed. He may have attended Townsend Harris High School for one year before entering the DeWitt Clinton High School, a prestigious school in Manhattan. Cullen served as the senior class vice president, edited the school magazine, received special honors in Latin studies, and was inducted into the Arista Honor Society. His first published poem, “To the Swimmer,” appeared in The Modern School during his sophomore year. He earned his bachelor’s degree at New York University, graduating in 1925. During his college years, Cullen’s work was published in such literary magazines as Century Magazine, Harper’s, and Poetry; he also won prizes for his work from W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine, The Crisis, and from the National Urban League publication, Opportunity. He won second prize in the Witter Bynner Poetry Contest for undergraduates for “The Ballad of the Brown Girl,” which retells an English folk ballad. He also pledged the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. Before matriculating at Harvard University for graduate studies, Cullen published Color (1925), his first volume of poetry, written in the style of the English Romantic poets, especially John Keats. Cullen received his master’s degree from Harvard in 1926.

Life’s Work

Upon his graduation from Harvard, Cullen returned to New York, where he had already gained a reputation as a leading literary figure. That summer, he traveled abroad with his father before becoming an assistant editor for the National Urban League’s Opportunity. He wrote a column, “Writing from the Dark Tower,” that addressed various literary and social issues. In January of 1927, Cullen received the Harmon Foundation’s award for literature at a ceremony at St. Mark’s Church in New York City. That year, he also published the poetry collections Copper Sun and The Ballad of the Brown Girl, and edited Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets. The following year, Cullen received a Guggenheim grant for a year’s study in France. Before he left for France, he married Nina Yolande Du Bois, daughter of the well-known intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, in a ceremony that was the social event of the year for the African American community. The marriage did not last, and when Cullen went to France, accompanied by his adoptive father and a friend, she declined to go with him. They were divorced in 1930.

Once in Paris, Cullen became associated with a group of black American artists and set out to fulfill the requirements of his grant. He wrote a series of articles that were published in The Crisis in the spring and summer of 1929. His major achievement, however, was the publication of The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929). Several years elapsed before he published another collection of poetry, but during that time, Cullen explored other forms of literature. In 1932, he published his only novel, One Way to Heaven, which dealt with the social strata in Harlem. The book was praised for its accurate portrayal of the decadent intelligentsia and the “simple people.” Cullen also wrote poems and stories for children. He declined several teaching positions at southern universities because he felt that the North was more racially tolerant. However, in 1934, he joined the faculty of the all-black Frederick Douglass Junior High School in New York as a French teacher. He continued to teach, write, lecture, and work in the community for the rest of his life. His translation of Euripides’ tragedy Medea was published in his 1935 volume Medea and Some Poems. Although Cullen had previously declared that he had no desire to remarry, in 1940 he reconsidered and married Ida Mae Roberson, whom he had met some years before. In the early 1940’s, Cullen published two volumes for children: The Lost Zoo (1940), about animals that died in the biblical flood story of Noah and the ark, and My Lives and How I Lost Them (1942), about his cat, Christopher. He also collaborated with Arna Bontemps on the playSt. Louis Woman (1945), a musical version of Bontemps’s novel God Sends Sunday. It ran for 113 performances at the Martin Beck Theater on Broadway. Later that year, the text of The Third Fourth of July: A One-Act Play, about how World War II touched the lives of a white family and a black family, appeared in the August issue of Theater Arts magazine; Cullen had written the play with Owen Dodson.

In August, 1945, Cullen wrote to a Harper’s editor about his plan to compile a volume of poems from his earlier collections. Readers’ responses throughout the years were to guide him in making selections. Cullen finally settled on eighty-nine poems for the collection On These I Stand. On New Year’s Day, 1946, he was hospitalized with uremic poisoning. He died on January 9, 1946. In early 1947, On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countee Cullen was published posthumously.

Significance

Cullen was a poet, author, and scholar, a man committed to helping African Americans attain greater significance in American life. He wrote in traditional forms and wanted to be known as a poet, not an African American poet, yet most of his best-known poems deal with race. Cullen was known as the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance. While not the most prolific of poets, Cullen is the one most often anthologized. He is on scholar Molefi Kete Asante’s 2002 list of the One Hundred Greatest African Americans.

Bibliography

Baker, Houston A., Jr. A Many-Colored Coat of Dreams: The Poetry of Countée Cullen. Detroit, Mich.: Broadside Press, 1974. Examines Cullen’s views on race and literature, and how they affect each other.

Ferguson, Blanche E. Countée Cullen and the Negro Renaissance. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1966. A biographical account of Cullen’s life and work; also contains biographical information about his adoptive father, Frederick Cullen. Illustrations; bibliography.

Perry, Margaret. A Bio-Bibliography of Countée P. Cullen, 1903-1946. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971. Part 1 is biographical and discusses Cullen’s poetry. Part 2 contains bibliographies of writing by Cullen, writing about him, newspaper references, poetry anthologies, and miscellaneous sources of information.

Wintz, Cary D. Harlem Speaks: A Living History of the Harlem Renaissance. Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks, 2007. Establishes the historical context of the Harlem Renaissance and includes biographical essays on its major figures, including Cullen. With CD of music, literary readings, interviews, and radio broadcasts.