COUNTEE CULLEN
1903-1946

Cullen, Countee (b. March 30, 1903, Louisville, Ky.; d. January 9, 1946, New York, N.Y.), African American poet, novelist, and playwright; the best-known black writer during the Harlem Renaissance.

In these last two lines of his poem "Yet Do I Marvel," Countee Cullen sums up the irony that he saw not only for himself but for all African American writers — the question of what happens when God makes a poet black, in a world that discourages black creativity, yet still bids him sing. Cullen was part of the generation of authors who emerged during the Harlem Renaissance and answered that question by their own writing.

Cullen's early history remained a mystery for decades, by his own choice — he was adopted as a teenager, and from that point on was always reticent about his birthplace and former family. But recent scholarship has indicated that he was born to Elizabeth Lucas in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1903, and then raised in New York by Elizabeth Porter, who may have been his maternal grandmother. His original surname was Porter, but sometime around Elizabeth Porter's death in 1918 he was taken in by the Rev. Frederick Cullen, pastor of the Harlem's prominent Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, and his wife Carolyn. Cullen considered the Cullens his parents, and absorbed their conservative values.

The Cullens sent him to the predominantly white DeWitt Clinton High School, where he was an excellent student and editor of the school newspaper and literary magazine. Cullen won a citywide poetry contest while he was still in high school, and wrote much of the material for his first two volumes of poetry as an undergraduate at New York University. His poetry received prizes in three national contests while he was still in college, and in 1925 he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and published his first book, Color. He went on to receive a master's degree in English and French from Harvard University. In the meantime, poems from Color had received prizes from the Crisis, Opportunity, and Poetry magazines.

Better educated in classical literary forms than many of the black writers who were his peers, Cullen's poetry was characterized by a use of traditional European verse patterns. Cullen explained that he chose forms and ideas that he believed transcended race because he wanted to be regarded simply as a poet, not a black poet. In his allegiance to ballads, sonnets, and standard English poetic language, Cullen stood apart from other Harlem Renaissance poets who were experimenting with new literary forms based on jazz and blues. As a result, Cullen enjoyed more crossover success than other African American poets at the time, because white scholars and audiences recognized and applauded his technical skills.

Cullen's celebrity was reinforced when, on April 9, 1928, he married Yolande Du Bois, the only child of the black intellectual and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. Their lavish wedding, at Cullen's father's church, was attended by 1000 guests and was one of the major social events of the Harlem Renaissance. It also appeared literally to place Cullen, and his generation of African American intellectuals, in the position of being Du Bois's heir. But Cullen had been involved for years with another man, Harlem schoolteacher Harold Jackman. When Cullen and Jackman sailed together for Paris two months after the wedding, leaving Yolande behind, it became clear the marriage was not meant to be, and Cullen and Du Bois were divorced in 1930.

Cullen's career took a turn at about the same time. In 1929, he had published The Black Christ and Other Poems. Cullen had worked on the title poem for two years, and considered it his masterpiece, but the book was not well received. He took a position as a French teacher at Frederick Douglass Junior High (where James Baldwin was among his students), and while he continued writing poetry, he began to experiment with other forms as well. These included One Way to Heaven (1934), his only novel, and The Lost Zoo (1940) and My Lives and How I Lost Them (1942), books of children's verse. In 1936 Cullen also became the first twentieth-century African American writer to publish a major translation of a classical work with his translation of Medea.

Just before his death, Cullen collaborated with the black writer Arna Bontemps on a dramatization of Bontemps's novel God Sends Sunday as a musical, St. Louis Blues. The production had been criticized by some African Americans for its portrayal of lower-class black life, but it opened on Broadway two months after Cullen's sudden death from high blood pressure and uremic poisoning on January 9, 1946.

Cullen had remarried in 1940, and his second wife, Ida, survived him. After his death, Langston Hughes eclipsed him as the best-known poet of the Harlem Renaissance, and some of Cullen's extraordinary fame and recognition during his career has been forgotten. But as a contemporary scholar summed up his achievements, "Some of his poems are utterly unforgettable, so capable was he of setting down in precise language the subtle feelings that made him one of the most intriguing writers in African American literature."

Contributed By:
Lisa Clayton Robinson