were married for 47 years, had four daughters and
two sons: Joan, Camille, Constance, Poppy, Paul,
and Arna Jr. As the Great Depression began, Bon-
temps faced the challenges of relocating from the
now-closed Harlem Academy. His exemplary
record at the school enabled him to secure a new
teaching post in the South, and the Bontemps
family were able to relocate their growing family
and left Harlem for Huntsville, Alabama.
While in New York City during the 1920s,
however, Bontemps immersed himself in the avail-
able educational and cultural opportunities and
began to forge valuable professional contacts and
friendships. In 1926 he received his first formal
recognition in two of the most notable Harlem Re-
naissance literary competitions. His poems “A Gar-
den Cycle” and “Nocturne of the Wharves,” which
competed against winning works by STERLING
BROWNand HELENEJOHNSON, won fourth-place
and sixth-place honorable mentions, respectively,
in the general poetry competition sponsored by
Opportunity.In another division of that same liter-
ary contest, judges WILLIAMSTANLEYBRAITH-
WAITE, Carl Sandburg, RIDGELY TORRENCE,
COUNTEECULLEN, and others awarded Bontemps
and his poem “The Return” the first-place prize in
the Alexander Pushkin Category of the Opportu-
nityPoetry Prize competition. That same year, Bon-
ner, with “A Nocturne at Bethesda,” won first prize
over Countee Cullen’s “Thoughts in a Zoo” and
works by EFFIELEENEWSOMEand BLANCHETAY-
LORDICKINSON. Six years later, in 1932, Bon-
temps’s devastating and most regularly anthologized
short story “A SUMMERTRAGEDY” was the sole
winner in the Opportunity Literary Contest for
which FANNIE HURST,STERLING BROWN, and
Richard Walsh served as judges. Bontemps’s suc-
cess as a poet led to his developing interest in writ-
ing, and he began work on his first novel, Chariot
in the Sky,despite the offers from publishers who
hoped that he might compile a volume of his po-
etic works.
Bontemps’s affiliation with the Seventh-Day
Adventist faith and school system shaped his liter-
ary life. He was transferred, for instance, to
Huntsville, Alabama, just after his first published
novel, GODSENDSSUNDAY,appeared in 1931. At
the Oakwood Junior College, a church-affiliated
school, he worked as an English teacher and as a
librarian. At a time when he could have capitalized
on his burgeoning reputation, Bontemps found
himself in an environment in which he had to
moderate his love of books and friendships beyond
the school circle. His regular correspondence with
Hughes, for instance, prompted school officials to
caution him against outside, secular, and problem-
atic political stances. He was, on one occasion, in-
structed to burn his collection of literature and
history books that included writings by Frederick
Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, JAMESWELDONJOHN-
SON, and Wallace Thurman in order to prove his
willingness to endorse the conservative political
status quo that the school upheld. He refused to
do so, and the heightening pressure under which
he was placed prompted him to resign his post a
year later. In the face of stark economic times and
limited financial resources, it was Bontemps’s own
writing that enabled his family to leave the South.
He used his royalties from sales of BLACKTHUN-
DER, his second novel, to finance his move to
CHICAGO. There, he joined the faculty at Shiloh
Academy, another Seventh-Day Adventist school,
from 1935 to 1938. In 1938, he began working
with the Works Progress Administration and in the
course of his six-year employment with the Illinois
Writer’s Project, met fellow writer RICHARD
WRIGHT.
Bontemps’s introduction to the Harlem Re-
naissance circle came from Countee Cullen, the
person who would judge Bontemps’s work in liter-
ary competitions and later collaborate with him
on St. Louis Woman,a stage adaptation of Thur-
man’s first novel. Cullen, who also asked Bon-
temps to be one of his 14 groomsmen when he
married NINAYOLANDEDUBOISin 1928 in one
of the most celebrated social events of the
Harlem Renaissance period, encouraged Bon-
temps to join the writer-artist gatherings that
were held frequently at the 135TH STREET
BRANCHof the NEWYORKPUBLICLIBRARY.He
was able to forge good professional relationships
and personal friendships with figures such as
Jessie Fauset, the woman who launched his pub-
lishing career, REGINAANDERSON,GWENDOLYN
BENNETT,RUDOLPHFISHER, Langston Hughes,
ALAINLOCKE, and many other active members of
the thriving African-American community. When
Bontemps relocated to Chicago in 1935, Richard56 Bontemps, Arnaud (Arna) Wendell