Arna Bontemps

Who Was Arna Bontemps?

Arna Bontemps was one of the most versatile and prolific figures of the Harlem Renaissance — a poet, novelist, children’s author, librarian, and anthologist whose career spanned five decades and whose influence on the preservation and dissemination of African American literature was enormous. Born in Alexandria, Louisiana, and raised in Los Angeles by a family that had embraced Seventh-day Adventism and the aspiration toward respectability, he encountered the Renaissance through his poetry, which won prizes in the Opportunity and Crisis magazines in the mid-1920s.

His novels — particularly Black Thunder (1936), a historical novel about the Gabriel Prosser slave rebellion of 1800 — represent some of the finest historical fiction of the period. His children’s books, often written in collaboration with Langston Hughes, introduced generations of young readers to African American history and culture. As head librarian at Fisk University from 1943 to 1965, he built one of the most important archives of African American literature in the country.

Bontemps’s religious background — his Adventist upbringing and his later, complex relationship with institutional faith — shaped his understanding of history as a narrative of liberation and judgment, a framework that gave his historical fiction its distinctive moral seriousness.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• God Sends Sunday — 1931 — novel
• Black Thunder — 1936 — novel
• Drums at Dusk — 1939 — novel
• The Poetry of the Negro — 1949 — anthology, ed. with Langston Hughes
• The Harlem Renaissance Remembered — 1972 — essays