Arna Bontemps

Arna Bontemps – Life, Work, and Enduring Voice

Delve into the life and legacy of Arna Wendell Bontemps (1902–1973), a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Explore his poetry, novels, editorial work, and quotes that speak to dignity, history, and the African American experience.

Introduction

Arna Wendell Bontemps (October 13, 1902 – June 4, 1973) was an American poet, novelist, librarian, and cultural archivist associated with the Harlem Renaissance. While he is perhaps less famous in popular memory than some of his contemporaries, Bontemps played a pivotal role in shaping African American letters—not just through his creative work, but also through his stewardship of Black literary heritage, his anthologies, and his service as a librarian and educator.

Early Life and Family

Arna Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, into a Louisiana Creole family. His father worked as a brick contractor; his mother was a schoolteacher. When he was about three years old, his family moved to Los Angeles, California.

Growing up in California, Bontemps’s early life was shaped by both southern roots and western surroundings. He attended Pacific Union College in Angwin, California, graduating in 1923 with a major in English and a minor in history.

One formative conflict involved his father’s wish that he distance himself from his Black identity: Bontemps was sent to a white boarding school in San Fernando under instructions not to “go up there acting colored.” That tension—between assimilation and pride, erasure and identity—echoes through much of his later work.

Education, Harlem & Early Literary Career

After college, Bontemps moved to New York City in 1924 and accepted a teaching position in Harlem. There he entered the dynamic circle of writers and intellectuals associated with the Harlem Renaissance: Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, among others.

During the mid-1920s, Bontemps published poems in The Crisis and Opportunity, literary journals central to the Harlem Renaissance. He won several poetry prizes in 1926 and 1927, helping launch his reputation as a poet.

In 1926 he married Alberta Johnson, a former student; they would have six children together.

Literary Work & Major Achievements

Poetry, Early Fiction & Historical Novels

Though Bontemps began as a poet, he gradually expanded into fiction, children’s literature, editorial work, and cultural scholarship.

• His first novel, God Sends Sunday (1931), traces the rise and fall of an African American jockey.

• In 1936, he published Black Thunder (Gabriel’s Revolt: Virginia 1800), a historical novel about the planned slave uprising led by Gabriel Prosser. It is among his most highly regarded works.

• In Drums at Dusk (1939), he turned to the Haitian Revolution, again exploring themes of resistance, memory, and collective struggle.

• He also wrote numerous books for children and young people, attempting to shape how history and culture were read by younger audiences.

• In the 1960s, he returned in part to poetry, publishing Personals (1963).

His poems are often marked by themes of endurance, dignity, the weight of history, and the musical and oral traditions of African American life.

Librarian, Scholar & Cultural Stewardship

In 1943, Bontemps earned a master’s degree in library science from the University of Chicago. Shortly thereafter, he became head librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.

At Fisk, he curated and expanded collections of African American literature, helping preserve letters, manuscripts, early editions, and cultural artifacts. His role as librarian and archivist was not separate from his identity as a writer—he saw preservation as part of the artistic mission.

Bontemps also co-edited landmark anthologies, including The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949 (with Langston Hughes) and The Book of Negro Folklore, which helped frame the broader tradition of Black literature and folklore as a serious field of study.

He served at Fisk until the mid-1960s, and later held positions or visiting roles at Illinois, Yale, and other institutions.

Historical & Literary Context

Arna Bontemps’s career spanned the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, the rising movements for civil rights, and the dawn of renewed interest in Black arts in the 1960s. His work reflects the tension between creating art and preserving culture; between imaginative freedom and historical truth.

As the academic acceptance of African American studies expanded, Bontemps’s archival work and anthologies became foundational for later scholars. His historical novels helped reclaim Black struggle and resistance as part of American memory—not as marginal footnotes, but as central stories of identity and possibility.

He bridged multiple genres—poetry, fiction, children’s books, editorial, scholarship—and in doing so helped shape a more expansive vision of what Black literary life could be.

Personality, Style & Themes

Bontemps’s voice is rooted in dignity, restraint, and depth. His writing often balances sorrow and defiance, memory and moral claim. He writes not just from suffering, but from a sense of inherited dignity and enduring possibility.

His style is sometimes conservative in form—metered lines, structured narrative—but his content is often radical: confronting slavery, revolt, identity, and erasure.

He also deeply valued collaboration and community. Through his friendships (especially with Langston Hughes) and his editorial work, he sought to build a collective voice rather than stand alone.

His commitment to younger readers, children’s literature, and public scholarship reveals a belief that literature is for community, not just elite audiences.

Famous Quotes of Arna Bontemps

“How dare anyone, parent, schoolteacher, or merely literary critic, tell me not to act colored.”

“Let us keep the dance of rain our fathers kept and tread our dreams beneath the jungle sky.”

“Yet would we die as some have done, beating a way for the rising sun.”

“Is there something we have forgotten? Some precious thing we have lost, wandering in strange lands?”

These lines evoke memory, identity, resistance, and longing—themes that run deeply through his body of work.

Lessons from Arna Bontemps

1. Preserve as part of creation
   Bontemps teaches that artistic work includes caring for archives, heritage, and memory—not just producing new texts.

2. Speak truth within tradition
   He uses traditional poetic and narrative forms to confront histories of injustice, showing that form and resistance can coexist.

3. Bridge audiences
   By writing for children, scholars, general readers, and students, Bontemps demonstrates the importance of cross-generational literary work.

4. Collaboration over solitary genius
   His partnerships with Hughes and others reflect a belief in collective voice and shared mission.

5. Literature as moral witness
   His novels of revolt and his poems of endurance suggest that writers bear responsibility to represent history with integrity.

Conclusion

Arna Bontemps’s legacy is multifaceted: poet, novelist, librarian, editor, cultural archivist, and moral witness. He helped carry the torch of the Harlem Renaissance into mid-century scholarship and public memory. His sensitive but unflinching voice—whether in poems, historical fiction, children’s books, or anthologies—still speaks to dignity, memory, and the possibility of reimagined identity.