Countee Cullen was an American poet, novelist, children's writer, and playwright of the Harlem Renaissance.
In the early 1920s, while at New York University, Cullen won several awards from prestigious poetry competitions and began publishing his work in national periodicals. He went on to pursue a masters in English at Harvard around the same time that his first poetry collection, Color (1925), was published. The collection, which included "Heritage" and "Incident", two of Cullen’s most famous poems, was both a celebration of the black experience and a powerful indictment of racism that became an emblem of the Harlem Renaissance.
Cullen later worked as assistant editor for Opportunity magazine, also writing a column, "The Dark Tower”, for which he further made a name for himself. Cullen’s next two poetry collections, The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927) and Copper Sun (1927) were similar in theme to Color, but were less well received.
Between the years 1928 and 1934, Cullen, initially enabled by a Guggenheim Fellowship, traveled back and forth between France and the United States.[1] By 1929, Cullen published The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929), the title open of which came under fire for comparing the lynching of a black man to the crucifixion of Christ.
Although race was a recurring subject in his poetry, Cullen argued for color-blind poetry and encouraged black writers to embrace traditional English poetic structures.[2]
He went on to pen a novel, two children's books, and write for the theater.
The American writer Alain Locke, wanting to boost a new generation of black writers such as Countee Cullen, as well as explore authentic portraits of sexuality, sought the poet out. Locke introduced Cullen to pro-gay writing, such as the work of Edward Carpenter, and helped him come to accept his bisexuality.
In 1928, Cullen married Yolande du Bois, the daughter of W.E.B. du Bois. The wedding was an enormous social event, with 3,000 people attending the ceremony. Several months into their new marriage, however, Cullen wrote to Yolande expressing his same-sex attractions, an admission that led to divorce. W.E.B. du Bois believed that it was Yolande's lack of sexual experience that doomed the union.[3]
Cullen subsequently had relationships with several men, later marrying Ida Mae Robertson in 1940, possibly while also in a relationship with Edward Atkinson. His second marriage, which lasted the rest of his life, seemed to be a happy one.