Arna wendell bontemps biography

Arna Wendell Bontemps was born on October 13, 1902, in Alexandria, Louisiana, the son of a Creole bricklayer and a schoolteacher.
Arna Wendell Bontemps (October 13, 1902 – June 4, 1973) was an American poet, novelist and librarian, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance.
Arna Wendell Bontemps was an American poet, novelist and librarian, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance.

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Poet, novelist and historian Arna Wendell Bontemps was born October 13^th 1902 in Alexandria, Louisiana. His mother Maria Pembroke was a schoolteacher and his father Paul Bontemps was a bricklayer. His father was keen for Arna to follow him in the bricklaying trade but young Arna was determined to better himself and do well in school. Like many other black families migrating from the South, the family moved to Los Angeles when Arna was three years old.

In 1923 Bontemps graduated from Pacific Union College in California and then moved into teaching with a post at the Harlem Academy, New York, from 1924. During his time there he started to publish poetry in various influential magazines which were popular with black people and begun to receive recognition in the form of the Alexander Pushkin Prize of Opportunity and in the Crisis Poetry Prize in 1926.

From early on in life Bontemps felt a need to change the world. He wrote of the plight of the black man and of all the hatred and racism in the world. He strongly emphasised the idea, felt by many at the time, of how the Negro man w

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ARNAUD WENDELL BONTEMPS (1902-1973)

Arnaud ("Arna") W. Bontemps was born to Paul Bismarck and Maria Carolina (Pembroke) Bontemps on October 13, 1902, in Alexandria, Louisiana. Three years after Bontemps' birth, as a result of several racial incidents, his father moved the family to Los Angeles, California. Reared in California, Bontemps received his primary and secondary education in both the public and private schools of the state. In, he was graduated from Pacific Union College with an A. B. degree. On August 26, 1916, Bontemps was married to the former Alberta Johnson, and they became the parents of six children (Joan Maria, Paul Bismarck, Poppy Alberta, Camille Ruby, Constance Rebecca, and Arna Alexander).
In 1943, he earned the M.L.S. degree from the Graduate School of Library Science, University of Chicago. The year following his graduation from Pacific Union College, Bontemps' literary career began when his poem "Hope" was published in Crisis magazine, a periodical of the National Association for the Advancement of Col

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Arna Bontemps

Arna Wendell Bontemps was born on October 13, 1902, in Alexandria, Louisiana, the son of a Creole bricklayer and a schoolteacher. At age three, he and his family moved to Los Angeles after his father was mortally threatened by two drunk white men. Bontemps grew up in California and was sent to the San Fernando Academy boarding school with his father’s instruction to not “go up there acting colored.” Bontemps later noted this as a formative moment, and he would resent what he saw as an effort to make him forget his African American heritage. He graduated from Pacific Union College in Angwin in 1923 with a bachelor of arts degree.

In 1924, Bontemps accepted a teaching position in Harlem, New York. He married Alberta Johnson, a former student, in 1926; they would eventually have six children. Though his original plan was to obtain his PhD in English, he accepted teaching positions to support his family. While teaching in Harlem, he became closely associated to figures from the Harlem Renaissance, befriending major artists such as Countee Cullen, W. E. B. DuBo