Countee Cullen

Countee Cullen (1903-1946), American poet, novelist, playwright, and educator. Cullen was one of the best-known black poets of the first half of the 20th century and an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Many details of Cullen’s early life, including his place of birth, are unknown. He was chiefly raised by Elizabeth Porter, who may have been his paternal grandmother, until her death in 1918. The teenager was then informally adopted into the family of Reverend Frederick Cullen, minister of the largest church in New York City’s predominantly black Harlem neighborhood.

Countee Porter Cullen attended the city’s prestigious De Witt Clinton High School, where he served as editor of the school newspaper and the literary magazine The Magpie. He earned a bachelor’s degree from New York University in 1925. While in high school and college, Cullen won a number of poetry contests. Soon after graduating he published his first volume of poetry, Color (1925). After earning a master’s degree from Harvard University in 1926, Cullen became assistant editor of Opportunity magazine. In 1927 he published a second collection of verse, Copper Sun. That same year Cullen also compiled and edited The Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets.

Cullen’s carefully crafted poems were widely admired by both whites and blacks. Although the Harlem Renaissance—a flowering of African American arts and literature in the 1920s—had encouraged many black writers to experiment with new literary forms, Cullen’s poetry remained very traditional. He was heavily influenced by the work of English poet John Keats and other Romantics and liked sonnets, ballads, and other traditional forms. In 1928 Cullen received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. Before his departure he married Nina Yolande Du Bois, the daughter of African American sociologist and political leader W. E. B. Du Bois. While still in Paris Cullen published The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929), featuring the title poem, which compared the plight of contemporary African Americans to the suffering of Jesus Christ. His marriage ended in divorce in 1930.

Cullen’s only novel, One Way to Heaven (1932), examined the significance of class divisions in black society. In 1934 Cullen became a teacher at Frederick Douglass Junior High School, a job that he kept until his death. The following year he published Medea and Other Poems, a book containing his translation of the ancient Greek poem by Euripides and a handful of original poems. He also collaborated with black writer Arna Bontemps on St. Louis Woman, a theatrical adaptation of her 1931 novel God Sends Sunday. Because the manuscript of the play was criticized for presenting unflattering images of the black community, St. Louis Woman was not produced until just after Cullen’s death in 1946.

Cullen published two books for children, The Lost Zoo (1940) and My Lives and How I Lost Them (1942), both of which he playfully claimed were written in collaboration with a house cat. Shortly before his death he compiled On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countee Cullen, which was published posthumously in 1948.