Books by  Arna Bontemps

God Sends Sunday: Novel /  Black Thunder, Gabriel's Revolt: Virginia, 1800  / Anyplace But Here /  The Harlem Renaissance Remembered

The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949  /  Bontemps, American Negro Poetry  /  Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters, 1925-1967

 The Old South;: "A summer tragedy" and other stories of the thirties / The Story of the Jubilee Singers  / Great Slave Narratives

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You have been good to me, I give you this:

The arms of lovers empty as our own,

marble lips sustaining one long kiss

And the hard sound of hammers breaking stone.

For I will build a chapel in the place

Where our love died and I will journey there

To make a sign and kneel before your face

And set an old bell tolling on the air.

Anyplace But Here

Arna Wendell Bontemps : A Bibliography

Robert E Fleming.  James Weldon Johnson and Arna Wendell Bontemps: A reference guide. G. K. Hall, 1978

Kirkland C. Jones. Man from Louisiana; A Biography of Arna Wendell Bontemps.. Greenwood Press, 1992.

Sterling Brown "Arna Bontemps: Co-worker, Comrade." Black World 22:11 (September 1973): 92-98.

Wikipedia-Wendell_Bontemps

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Arna Wendell Bontemps (1902-1973) -- born in Alexandria, Louisiana, the son of Creole parents --  was one of the more prolific writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He was the author of over 25 books of poetry, history, biography, fiction and anthologies. Bontemps was a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Bontemps served as head librarian at Fisk University from 1969 to 1972. He was also curator of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at Yale University.  In 1923, Bontemps received his B.A. from Pacific Union College in Angwin. In 1924, his poetry appeared in Crisis magazine, the NACCP periodical edited by Dr. W.E.B. DuBois.

In 1926 Golgotha Is a Mountain won the Alexander Pushkin Award and in 1927 Nocturne at Bethesda achieved first honors in the Crisis poetry contest. Personals, a collection of poetry was published in 1963.

Bontemps then turned to prose. In the decade of the thirties, he wrote three acclaimed novels God Sends Sunday (1931); Black Thunder (1936); and Drums at Dusk (1939). Frustrated in his ability to reach his own generation Bontemps to literature for children and young graders. In 1937 he published the Sad-Faced Boy; and others for  young audience included We Have Tomorrow (1945) Slappy Hopper (1946) and Story of the Negro (1948).

Bontemps was involved in the publication of at least three anthologies: Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers (1941);  with Langston Hughes, The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949 (1949);  and Bontemps, American Negro Poetry (1963 & 1974 rev.). Bontemps was gracious enough to include Christian's poems in all his anthologies.

Bontemps' beautiful short story "A Summer Tragedy" is found often in anthologies. It is indeed a treat. His poems "A Black Man Thinks of Reaping," "Southern Mansion," and "Nocturne at Bethesda" are often anthologized. But such poems as "My Heart Has Known Its Winter" and "Day Breakers" are also found in anthologies.

Early in his career Bontemps had wanted to get a Ph.D. in English but with his marriage in 1926 and the coming of six children he had to work. He taught for awhile at an Alabama junior college. With the coming of the Depression he worked for the Illinois WPA and supervised and assisted in the writing of a history of the Negro in Illinois. In 1943 he completed a degree in library science and served as librarian at Fisk University and developed an archive of African American cultural materials that is a major resource for study in this field.

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update 1 May 2009