Countee Cullen

Countee Cullen, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1941.

Countee Cullen (Louisville?, United States, May 30, 1903 - New York, January 9, 1946) was an American poet, who is included in the Harlem Renaissance.

Biography

Countee Cullen, was born as Countee LeRoy Porter, in 1903, but it is not known for sure where, because he was jealous of his private life. Some biographers point out that he was born in Louisville, Kentucky and some others in Baltimore, Maryland, where he was abandoned by his mother, Elizabeth Thomas Lucas, and raised by Mrs. Porter , who was probably his paternal grandmother. When he was 9 years old, they moved to Harlem, where, in 1918, Mrs. Porter died and Cullen was adopted by Frederick A. Cullen, a pastor in the Methodist Church, and his wife Carolyn.

He completed his studies at "DeWitt Clinton High School" of New York and later at New York University, where he was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity. In those years he won several prizes for his poem “Ballad of the brown girl”, and published his first volume of poetry “Color”, with which he was admitted to Harvard where he obtained a master's degree in 1926. After this he returned to New York to work as a teacher. His work has appeared in various publications, including “The Crisis” , the NAACP newspaper edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, and “Opportunity” , the magazine of the National Urban League.

Works

Although he also worked with other literary genres, most of his work, and according to his critics the best, is poetic. Cullen began writing poetry during high school and was first published at the age of 22, with the work of poetry “Colour” (1925). His popularity increased and he quickly became one of the best known authors of the Harlem Renaissance or New African American Renaissance.

Some of his works are:

Poetry

• Color1925
• Copper Sun1927
• My Soul's High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen1991
• On These I Stand: An An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countee Cullen1947
• The Ballad of the Brown Girl, 1928
• The Black Christ and Other Poems, 1929
• The Medea and Some Other Poems, 1935

Prosa

• My Lives and How I Lost Them, 1942
• One Way to Heaven, 1931
• The Lost Zoo, 1940

Theatre

• St. Louis Woman, 1946

His body rests in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.