This Goodly Land

Arna Bontemps

Dates

October 12, 1902 - June 4, 1973

Other Names Used

• Arnaud Wendell Bontemps: full name

Alabama Connection

Selected Works

• Bontemps, Arna. God Sends Sunday. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931. Rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1972. Rpt. New York: Washington Square Press, 2005.
• Bontemps, Arna. Black Thunder. New York: Macmillan, 1936. Rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968. Rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
• Bontemps, Arna. Sad-Faced Boy. Illus. Virginia Lee Burton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937. For younger readers.
• Bontemps, Arna, and Jack Conroy. They Seek a City. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1945. Rpt. as Anyplace But Here. New York: Hill and Wang, 1966. Rpt. as Anyplace But Here. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997.
• Bontemps, Arna. The Story of the Negro. Illus. Raymond Lufkin. New York: Knopf, 1948. Rpt. New York: Knopf, 1955. Rpt. New York: Knopf, 1969. For younger readers.
• Bontemps, Arna. Lonesome Boy. Illus. Feliks Topolski. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955. Rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988. For younger readers.
• Bontemps, Arna. Personals. London: P. Bremen, 1963. Rpt. London: P. Bremen, 1973.
• Bontemps, Arna. The Old South: "A Summer Tragedy" and Other Stories of the Thirties. New York: Dodd Mead, 1973.

Literary Awards

Biographical Information

Arna Bontemps was born in the rural community of Alexandria, La. When he was four, Bontemps’s family moved to southern California. Bontemps did well in school there and read voraciously. He attended the San Fernando Academy and majored in English at Pacific Union College. After graduating in 1923 with an AB degree, Bontemps worked at the Los Angeles Post Office and wrote poetry in his spare time. After one of his poems was published in The Crisis in 1924, Bontemps moved to New York City. He btained a teaching job at Harlem Academy and made connections with the writers, artists, and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1926 and 1927, his poems won prizes sponsored by Opportunity and The Crisis magazines. Bontemps married in 1926, and the first of his six children was born the following year. His first novel God Sends Sunday was published in 1931. Harlem Academy closed that year, and Bontemps accepted a position at Oakwood College in Huntsville, Ala. His first children’s books, Popo and Fifina (a collaboration with Langston Hughes) and You Can’t Pet a Possum, were published while he was in Alabama. Bontemps had difficulties with college administrators who thought he was a radical. He resigned in 1934 and moved his family to California where they lived for a year with his father.

In 1935, Bontemps sold his novel Black Thunder (published in 1936) and moved with his family to Chicago. He was principal of Shiloh Academy until 1937, when he obtained a fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Fund to do research in the Caribbean. (His novel Drums at Dusk was published in 1939.) On his return, he worked for the WPA Federal Writer’s Project in Chicago. In 1942, Bontemps enrolled in library school at the University of Chicago, supporting his family with a second Rosenwald Fund fellowship. He accepted a position at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., in 1943. For the next twenty-three years, Bontemps was Head Librarian at Fisk, using his Harlem Renaissance connections to acquire materials by and about black writers, artists, and musicians. He also taught creative writing classes and continued his own writing, publishing nonfiction books for adults and both fiction and nonfiction books for children. Some of these works were collaborations with writers Langston Hughes and Jack Conroy. Bontemps also edited anthologies of black poetry and folklore, often in collaboration with Hughes. He also received Carnegie and Guggenheim research grants. In 1966, the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle recruited Bontemps to teach American literature. In his second year there, he suffered a stroke and had to return to Nashville. After recovering, he taught at Yale University for two years. In 1971, Bontemps returned to Nashville to become Writer-in-Residence at Fisk. He began doing research for an autobiography but never began writing it. He died of a heart attack in Nashville in 1973 and is buried there.

Interests and Themes

Arna Bontemps wrote poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for both children and adults about the black experience in the United States and the Caribbean. Several of his children’s books (You Can’t Pet a Possum, Sad-Faced Boy, and Mr. Kelso’s Lion) are based on his experiences in Alabama. His short story "A Summer Tragedy" is also set in Alabama.

For More Information

Please check your local library for these materials. If items are not available locally, your librarian can help you borrow them through the InterLibrary Loan program. Your librarian can also help you find other information about this author.

There may be more information available through the databases in the Alabama Virtual Library. If you are an Alabama citizen, AVL can be used at your public library or school library media center. You can also get a username and password from your librarian to use AVL at home.

Reference Articles

• Alvarez, Joseph A. "The Lonesome Boy Theme as Emblem for Arna Bontemps's Children's Literature." African American Review 32.1 (1998): 23-31.
• Canaday, Nicholas. "Arna Bontemps: The Louisiana Heritage." Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts 4.1-3 (1981): 163-169.
• Harris, Violet J. "From Little Black Sambo to Popo and Fifina: Arna Bontemps and the Creation of African-American Children's Literature." The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children's Literature 14.1 (1990): 108-127.
• James, Charles L. "Arna Bontemps: Harlem Reniassance Writer, Librarian, and Family Man." The [New] Crisis Sept./Oct. 2002: 22-28.
• James, Charles L. "On the Legacy of the Harlem Renaissance: A Conversation with Arna Bontemps and Aaron Douglas." Obsidian: Black Literature in Review 4.1 (1978): 32-53.
• Jones, Kirkland C. "Bontemps and the Old South." African American Review 27.2 (1993): 179-185.

Reference Web Sites

• Arna Bontemps African American Museum: The Man and His Works. 2008. http://www.arnabontempsmuseum.com/Home/tabid/309/Default.aspx
• Duke-Sylvester, Jennifer. "Arna Bontemps." Tennessee Authors: Past & Present. 2003. University of Tennessee Libraries. http://www.lib.utk.edu/refs/tnauthors/authors/bontemps-a.html

Location of Papers

• Fisk University
• Library of Congress
• Syracuse University
• Yale University

Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Carl van Vechten Photographs Collection, LC-USZ62-100856.

Last updated on 2009-10-10.