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CULLEN, COUNTEE (1900-46)

Price: $95.00

Description:

American poet, novelist, children’s writer and playwright; particularly well known during the Harlem Renaissance. Toward the end of his life he was a high school teacher of literature.

FIRST EDITION (UNSIGNED)  – Color, Harper & Bros., 1925. Hardbound with original dust jacket. Interior clean and fresh.

Cullen graduated from Harvard with a master’s degree in English.  He worked as an assistant editor for Opportunity Magazine. Between 1928-34 he traveled back and forth between France and the US (as did many Black American artists and performers). By 1929 he had published four volumes of poetry. One of his more controversial books, “The Black Christ and Other Poems,” (1929) was criticized for the use of Christian religious imagery.  Cullen compared the lynching of a black man to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

From 1934 until his death, Cullen taught high school English, French and creative writing at Federick Douglass Junior High School in New York.  During this period he also write two works for young readers:  The Lost Zoo and My Life and How I Lost Them. In his final years he wrote primarily for the theatre.  An unsung literary icon.

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