• Poet Arnaud "Arna" Wendell Bontemps, 1902

   

Bontemps was born in the city of Alexandria, Louisiana, on October 13, 1902 to Charlie Bontemps and Marie Pembrooke Bontemps, a Louisiana Creole family. When he was three, his family moved to Los Angeles, California, in the Great Migration of blacks out of the South to cities of the North, Midwest and West. They settled in what became known as the Watts district.

After attending public schools, Bontemps graduated from Pacific Union College in California in 1923, where he majored in English and minored in history. Bontemps was a member of Omega Psi Phi fraternity.

After graduation, he went to New York to teach at Harlem Academy. In New York Bontemps became an important contributor to the Harlem Renaissance, where he met many lifelong friends including Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. Hughes became a role model, collaborator and dear friend to Bontemps.

He returned to graduate school and earned a master's degree in library science from the University of Chicago in 1943. Bontemps was appointed as head librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. In that position for nearly a quarter of a century, he developed important collections and archives of African - American literature and culture, namely the Langston Hughes Renaissance Collection. He was initiated as a member of the Zeta Rho Chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia Fraternity at Fisk in 1954.

Bontemps was a prolific writer as well as a librarian. He received attention for his first novel, God Sends Sunday (1931), and Black Thunder (1936). He wrote the play St. Louis Woman (1946) with Countee Cullen. He was noted for the anthology Great Slave Narratives (1969).

He also wrote several children's books; critics highly praised his The Story of the Negro (1948). It received the Jane Addams Children's Book Award and was a Newbery Honor Book.

After retiring from Fisk University in 1966, Bontemps worked at the University of Illinois (Chicago Circle). He moved to Yale University, where he served as curator of the James Weldon Johnson Collection.

Through his librarianship and bibliographic work, Bontemps became a leading figure in establishing African - American literature as a legitimate object of study and preservation.

Bontemps died June 4, 1973, in Nashville, from a myocardial infarction (heart attack), while working on his autobiography.

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Arna Bontemps on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.