which was written by COUNTEECULLEN. Located in
HARLEMon West 136th Street, the salon’s hostess
was A’LELIAWALKER, daughter of Madam C. J.
Walker, the self-made and first black woman million-
aire. Walker hoped that writers and artists would
benefit from the open sessions and art exhibitions at
her home. The location was eventually redesigned
into a popular restaurant and nightclub that was
open to both African-American and white patrons.
Davis, Allison (1902–1983)
A graduate of Williams College, HOWARDUNIVER-
SITY, and the UNIVERSITY OFCHICAGO, this WASH-
INGTON, D.C., native and psychologist was also a
published poet and professor. His poems appeared in
THECRISIS,and at the end of the Renaissance he
coauthored Children of Bondage: The Personality De-
velopment of Negro Youth in the Urban South(1940),
a lengthy social psychology study of African-Ameri-
can children’s development, with John Dollard.
Davis authored the Crisisreview of W. E. B.
DUBOIS’s 1928 novel Dark Princess,a text that he
declared a “sane and balanced work, purged of any
rash and strident ‘aggressiveness’ ” (Aptheker, 27).
Bibliography
Aptheker, Herbert. Introduction to Dark Princess: A Ro-
mance.1928; reprint, Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thom-
son Organization Limited, 1974, 5–29.
Davis, Arthur P.(1904–1996)
Davis was a regularly published Norfolk Gazette
columnist and a literary critic with unwavering
theories about race and talent. In 1941, just after
the close of the Harlem Renaissance, Davis col-
laborated with STERLING BROWNand ULYSSES
LEEto publish The Negro Caravan: Writings by
American Negroes.The three coeditors used this
collection, which numbered more than 1,000
pages, to assert their belief that race was neither a
determining nor defining characteristic of a writer
or a literary tradition.
Davis, Frank Marshall(1905–1987)
A journalist, editor, and poet whose first book,
BLACKMAN’SVERSEwas published in 1935 and
deemed a critical success. Davis regarded poetry as
“a subjective way of looking at the world” and be-
lieved that “[a]ll poetry worthy of the name is pro-
paganda” (Tidwell, “Interview,” 107).
Davis was born in Arkansas City, Kansas. His
parents divorced while he was still an infant. He at-
tended Friends University in Wichita before trans-
ferring to Kansas State Agricultural College, where
he studied journalism. He published three books of
poetry during the Harlem Renaissance period:
Black Man’s Verse (1935), I AM THE AMERICAN
NEGRO(1937), and THROUGHSEPIAEYES(1938).
A fourth book, 47th Street,appeared in 1948, the
same year in which Davis relocated to Hawaii.
Davis began writing poetry in college at the
urging of Ada Rice, his English professor. His work
soon earned him membership in the American
College Quill Club. His success, he recalled in an
interview with his biographer, transformed him
into “a curiosity” and he became “known as ‘the
poet who looks like a prizefighter’” (Tidwell, “In-
terview,” 105).
ARNA BONTEMPSsuggested that the “main
quality” of Davis’s poetry was “ruggedness.” “Per-
haps this is not surprising,” Bontemps continued,
“in a poet who worked with street construction
gangs in his youth and who has since lived the
rough-and-tumble life of a newspaper man” (Bon-
temps, 357). Major American poets such as Carl
Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, FENTONJOHNSON,
LANGSTONHUGHES, and STERLINGBROWN in-
spired Davis. In addition to liking Sandburg’s
“hard, muscular poetry,” Davis also was impressed
by Edgar Lee Masters. Masters’s “economy of
words and ability to knife through to the heart”
made an impression on Davis, who also admitted
that he “had not patience with [Masters’s] rhyme”
(Tidwell, Interview, 105).
Davis’s biographer John Edgar Tidwell notes
that Davis “emerged in the 1930s as one of the
foremost Black practitioners of social realism in po-
etry” (Tidwell, “Interview,” 105). His development
as a poet benefited enormously from his contacts
with other Harlem Renaissance–era writers while
he was living in Chicago. When he moved there in
1934, RICHARDWRIGHTurged Davis to join the
League of American Writers. In addition, he dis-
cussed writing with MARGARETWALKER, Gwen-
dolyn Brooks, Fenton Johnson, and Wright while
participating with them in a short-lived writing114 Davis, Allison