An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 7/29/2020
Prelude | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | Email |
|---|
"How dare anyone --parent, schoolteacher, or merely literary critic-- tell me not to act coloured."
One of the heavyweights of the Harlem Renaissance (and a contemporary of Langston Hughes), poet and writer Arna Wendell Bontemps was born in Louisiana in 1902. Following the career path of a teacher, he eventually came to New York and turned his talents to poetry and fiction --including a great many children's stories. His first novel, God Sends Sunday, appeared in 1931 and is considered one of the defining centerpieces of the Harlem Renaissance, eventually being adapted into the musical "St. Louis Woman." Over the years Bontemps would collaborate with Hughes on a number of poetry anthologies and collections of nonfiction essays, but perhaps their greatest collaboration was a deliberate answer to the harsh racial stereotypes offered in the short story Little Black Sambo; the result was the bestseller Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti, about the lives of two children whose father leaves a life of farming to earn a living as a fisherman.
One of Bontemps' most significant works is his 1936 historical fictional novel Black Thunder, about an unsuccessful slave revolt in 19th-century Virginia. The book was arguably the first to properly depict black dialect with in-character pronunciation; Bontemps' creative skill with verbiage helped the reader to "hear" a more authentic dialect in the conversations of the characters, laying out a compelling portrait of life in a slave community. Although the book was virtually unnoticed when it was first published, a second printing in 1968 --at the height of the Civil Rights movement-- attracted much critical attention.
Recommended reading:
Renaissance Man from Louisiana: A Biography of Arna Wendell Bontemps by Kirkland C. Jones (1992)
Next page - Lesson 24: Blanche Kelso Bruce