Arna Wendell Bontemps (bahn-TAHM) began his literary career writing poetry, yet his fame as one of the twentieth century’s most prolific and versatile black writers rests largely on his association with the Harlem Renaissance, on one widely anthologized short story, on his children’s books, and on his novel Black Thunder.

Born in Alexandria, Louisiana, on October 13, 1902, the son of musician, brickmason, and lay minister Paul Bontemps and teacher Marie Pembroke, Arna Bontemps grew up in Los Angeles, California, attending boarding school and earning his B.A. from Pacific Union College (1923) and his M.A. from the University of Chicago (1943). After his mother died when he was twelve, Bontemps lived with his grandmother and her younger brother. His father’s inclination toward fundamentalist Christianity and his disinterest in African American folk heritage contrasted with his granduncle’s affinity for drink, gambling, music, and spontaneity. Bontemps ultimately sided with his granduncle and chose African folk expression, even though his father’s persistent influence left him ambivalent.

In the 1920’s, Bontemps left his Los Angeles post-office job for New York City, where he quickly achieved poetic success. In 1926, he married schoolteacher Alberta Johnson. He acquainted himself with the major figures of the Harlem Renaissance and began a correspondence and collaboration with Langston Hughes. His Harlem period culminated...

Arna Wendell Bontemps, whose parentage was Louisiana Creole, was born in the front bedroom of his maternal grandfather’s comfortable home at the corner of Ninth and Winn Streets in Alexandria, Louisiana. The house is still standing, though it has been moved; in 1992 it became the site of the Arna Bontemps African American Museum. Bontemps’s father, a skilled stonemason, bricklayer, and former trombonist with a New Orleans marching band, moved with his wife, children, and in-laws to California following a racial incident in Louisiana. The elder Bontemps also served as a Seventh-Day Adventist preacher after he abandoned Catholicism.

Bontemps’s earliest childhood was spent happily in his grandparents’ house in Alexandria. Later, in California, he was greatly influenced by a great-uncle, Uncle Buddy, who came from Alexandria to stay with his relatives in California. Though Uncle Buddy was a down-at-the-heels alcoholic, he nevertheless represented for young Bontemps the essence of Louisiana culture, folklore, and history with his colorful stories and speech. Self-educated, intelligent, and articulate, Uncle Buddy was a good reader and storyteller and awakened in his grandnephew a love of hearing and telling stories and of reading and reciting poetry. Most important, Uncle Buddy reminded young Bontemps of his Louisiana and southern roots, which were later to be a great literary storehouse for the budding author.

Bontemps’s mother died when...

Arna Bontemps, at age twenty-one, accepted a teaching position in New York City at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. Through his poetry, novels, short stories, and essays, he became one of that movement’s defining writers. Bontemps, whose father was a bricklayer and whose mother, a schoolteacher, instilled in him a love of books, was born in Louisiana, but, because of white threats against his family, was reared and educated in California, where he was graduated from Pacific Union College in 1923.

The Bontemps family settled in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1905. At the time they were the only African American family in the neighborhood. When Bontemps was twelve years old, his mother died, and he was sent to live with relatives in the California countryside. There, by becoming his Uncle Buddy’s “companion and confidant in the corn rows,” Bontemps gained access to a living embodiment of Southern black folk culture. According to Bontemps, Uncle Buddy was an “old derelict” who drank alcohol and loved “dialect stories, preacher stories, ghost stories, slave and master stories. He half-believed in signs and charms and mumbo-jumbo, and he believed whole-heartedly in ghosts.” Concerned at Uncle Buddy’s influence, Bontemps’ father sent his son to a white boarding school, admonishing him, “Now don’t go up there acting colored.” Fifty years later, the rebuke still rankled: Recalling his father’s advice in 1965, Bontemps...