experienced difficulties from the beginning. Finally, after informing her father that
Cullen had confessed that he was sexually attracted to men, Nina Yolande sued for divorce,
which was obtained in Paris in 1930.
Cullen continued to write and publish after 1928, but his works were no longer
universally acclaimed. The Black Christ and Other Poems, completed under the
Guggenheim Fellowship, was published in 1929 while he was abroad. His only novel, One
Way to Heaven, was published in 1932, and The Medea and Some Poems in 1935. He
wrote two books for juveniles, The Lost Zoo (1940) and My Lives and How I Lost
Them (1942). His stage adaptation of One Way to Heaven was produced by several
amateur and professional theater groups but remained one of his several unpublished plays.
Critics gave these works mixed reviews at best.
Cullen’s reputation as a writer rests on his poetry. His novel is not an important
work, and it received little attention from the critics. He rejected so-called jazz and
free-style as inappropriate forms of poetic expression. He was a romantic lyric poet and a
great admirer of John Keats and Edna St. Vincent Millay. While his arch traditionalism and
lack of originality in style had been seen in Color as minor flaws, they came to be
viewed as major deficiencies in his later works.
Cullen’s fall from grace with the critics had little effect on his popularity. He
remained much in demand for lectures and readings by both white and black groups. In 1931
alone he read his poetry and lectured in various institutions in seventeen states and
Canada. Some of his poems were set to music by Charles Marsh, Virgil Thomson, William
Schuman, William Lawrence, Margaret Bonds, Clarence Cameron White, Emerson Whithorne, and
Noel DaCosta. However, even though he continued to live with his foster father, royalties
and lecture fees were insufficient income for subsistence. He searched for academic
positions and was offered professorships at Sam Huston College (named for an Iowa farmer,
not the Texas senator), Dillard University, Fisk University, Tougaloo College, and West
Virginia State College. There is no clear explanation of why he did not accept any of the
positions. In 1932 he became a substitute teacher in New York public schools and became a
full-time teacher of English and French at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in 1934,
a position he held until his death (caused by complications of high blood pressure) in New
York City, and where he taught and inspired the future novelist and essayist James
Baldwin.
Cullen married Ida Mae Roberson in 1940, and they apparently enjoyed a happy married
life. Cullen’s chief creative interest during the last year of his life was in writing the
script for St. Louis Woman, a musical based on Arna Bontemps’s novel God Sends
Sunday. With music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by Johnny Mercer, St. Louis Woman
opened on Broadway on 30 March 1946. Although the production was opposed by Walter White
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and some other civil
rights activists as an unfavorable representation of African Americans, it ran for four
months and was revived several times by amateurs and one professional group between 1959
and 1980.
On These I Stand, a collection of poems that Cullen had selected as his best,
was published posthumously in 1947. The 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library
was named for Cullen in 1951, and a public school in New York City and one in Chicago also
bear his name. For a few brief years Cullen was the most celebrated African-American
writer in the nation and by many accounts is considered one of the major voices of the
Harlem Renaissance.
Bibliography
Count?e Cullen’s personal papers (1921-1969, c. 4,400 manuscripts and photographs and
thirty-nine volumes) are in the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University; microfilm
copies of that collection are in other repositories. The James Weldon Johnson Collection
in Beinecke Library at Yale University contains more than 900 letters written by and to
Cullen and other writings by and about him. One of the best biographies is Michael L.
Lomax, "Countee Cullen: From the Dark Tower" (Ph.D. diss., Emory Univ., 1984).
Also valuable is the biographical introduction to My Soul’s High Song: The Collected
Writings of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Gerald Early (1991).
This volume contains reprints of all Cullen’s published books except Caroling Dusk,
The Lost Zoo, My Lives and How I Lost Them, and On These I Stand; it
also contains some of Cullen’s uncollected poems, speeches, and essays. See also Blanche
E. Ferguson, Countee Cullen and the Negro Renaissance (1966); Margaret Perry, A
Bio-Bibliography of Count?e P. Cullen, 1903-1946 (1971); and Alan R. Shucard, Countee
Cullen (1984), for biographical studies. For critical studies of Cullen’s poetry, see
Houston A. Baker, Jr., "A Many-Colored Coat of Dreams: The Poetry of Countee
Cullen," in his Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic
(1988), pp. 45-87; Isaac William Brumfield, "Race Consciousness in the Poetry and
Fiction of Countee Cullen" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana,
1977); Nicholas Canaday, Jr., "Major Themes in the Poetry of Countee Cullen," in
The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, ed. Arna Bontemps (1972), pp. 103-25; Eugenia W.
Collier, "I Do Not Marvel, Countee Cullen," in Modern Black Poets, ed.
Donald B. Gibson (1973), pp. 69-83; Arthur P. Davis, "The Alien-and-Exile Theme in
Countee Cullen’s Racial Poems," Phylon 14 (Fourth Quarter 1953): 390-400;
Robert E. Fennell, "The Death Figure in Countee Cullen’s Poetry" (M.A. thesis,
Howard Univ., 1970); and David Kirby, "Countee Cullen’s Heritage: A Black Waste
Land," South Atlantic Bulletin 4 (1971): 14-20. Of value also is James
Baldwin, "Rendezvous with Life: An Interview with Countee Cullen," Magpie
26 (Winter 1942): 19-21. For an extensive discussion of Cullen’s impact on Baldwin, see
David Leeming, Baldwin (1994). Obituaries and related articles are in the New
York Herald Tribune, 10 Jan. 1946; the New York Times, 10 and 12 Jan. 1946, and
the Negro History Bulletin 14 (Feb. 1946): 98.
Source: http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-00391.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. Access Date: Wed Mar 21 11:27:39 2001
Copyright (c) 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Published by Oxford University
Press. All rights reserved.
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