Biography
Arnaud "Arna" Bontemps was born to Creole parents, Paul Bismark and Maria Carolina Bontemps, on October 13, 1902, in Alexandria, Louisiana. Soon after, the Bontemps family moved across the country to Los Angeles. Raised in the Watts section of Los Angeles, Bontemps went to both public and private grammar schools. Because he refused to learn his father's trade as a brick mason, Bontemps decided to attend college. In 1916, he married and began raising his own family that included six children. Eventually he graduated from Pacific Union College (now known as the University of California Los Angles) with an A.B. degree in 1923. It was then that Bontemps began publishing his poetry, and only one year out of college Bontemps's poem "Golgatha is a Mountain" won the Opportunity Alexander Pushkin Award for poetry. Again in 1927, Bontemps won the award and also was the winner of the NAACP's Crisis poetry contest for his poem "Nocturne at Bethesda." Three years after graduating he decided to move to New York City to teach at the Harlem Academy. This put Bontemps in the middle of the Harlem Renaissance. He collaborated with and learned from many other black writers of the time including Langston Hughes and Jack Conroy. In 1943, Bontemps earned a Master's degree in Library Science from the University of Chicago.
Bontemps grew weary of trying to change the minds of the old and turned the focus of his writing upon the youth who were "not yet insensitive to man's inhumanity to man." He wrote biographies, children's fiction, and black history, and he compiled many African American archives to be used as resources for studying Black Americans. Bontemps moved to Tennessee in 1943 to serve as the librarian of Fisk University in Nashville and remained there until his retirement in 1966.
Bibliography
Drama
Fiction
Non-Fiction
Poetry
Young Adult
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