First Edition Copy of Color by Countee Cullen

Incident Once riding in old Baltimore,     Heart-filled, head-filled with glee, I saw a Baltimorean     Keep looking straight at me. Now I was eight and very small,     And he was no whit bigger, And so I smiled, but he poked out     His tongue, and called me, "Nigger." I saw the whole of Baltimore     From May until December; Of all the things that happened there     That's all that I remember. Countee Cullen was considered by many to be the most promising of the young poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Cullen preferred not to be considered as a Black poet, but rather wanted to achieve success on the basis of traditional English standards. However, in spite of this, it was his race-conscious lyrics which were his most fruitful. Shortly after Countee's birth in 1903 to Elizabeth Lucas in Louisville, Kentucky, he was taken to New York City to be cared for by Elizabeth Porter—probably his paternal grandmother. When she died in 1918 he was taken to he home of Reverend an Mrs. Frederick Cullen. They had strong ties to the NAACP and the National Urban League and were deeply interested in race matters. The Cullens adopted Countee and brought him up with a strong Christian background. He excelled as a student and poet in a predominantly white high school and attended New York University upon his graduation in 1922. While in college he won prizes in 1923, 1924, and 1925 in a poetry contest open to all American students. In 1925 he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in English and French and began study in Harvard University for his master's degree. It was in that same year that he produced his first book of poetry, Color, shown above. He went on to win several other prizes for poetry from magazines. Cullen went on to obtain several honors throughout the 1920's. In 1928 he married Nina Yolande DuBois, the daughter of W. E. B. DuBois. The marriage was a failure. Two months after the wedding, Cullen and his best man left for Europe without Yolande. He formalized their divorce from Paris in 1930. By this time Cullen's career was in decline. In 1934 he turned to teaching French and English in Frederick Douglass Junior High School (James Baldwin was one of his pupils) to support himself. He continued his writing and produced in addition to his poetry, the very engaging and clever books on children's literature, "co-authored" with his cat, Christopher—The Lost Zoo (1940), and My Lives and How I Lost Them (1942).* He also collaborated with Arna Bontemps on a musical entitled St. Louis Woman. Countee Cullen suffered high blood pressure and uremic poisoning and died suddenly on January 9, 1946. After his death, a collection the Cullen himself had arranged was published in the volume On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countee Cullen. * Countee Cullen recounts in this work imaginary conversations he holds with his cat, Christopher Cat, whose father was descended from the "Christopher Cat" who was on Noah's Ark. In The Lost Zoo Christopher relates stories about the other animals who were invited but did not get on. In My Lives and How I Lost Them Christopher points out that he is in the middle of his ninth life and gives an account of how he lost the other eight.