Arna Wendell Bontemps (/bɒnˈtɒm/ bon-TOM[1]) (October 13, 1902 – June 4, 1973)[2] was an American poet, novelist and librarian, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance.

When Bontemps was three years old, his family moved to Los Angeles, California, in the Great Migration of blacks out of the South and into cities of the North, Midwest and West.

In August 1924, at the age of 22, Bontemps published his first poem, "Hope" (originally called "A Record of the Darker Races"), in The Crisis, official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay and Jean Toomer.

This novel explored the story of an African-American jockey named Little Augie who easily earns money and carelessly squanders it.

Thirty miles from Huntsville in Decatur, the Scottsboro boys, nine African Americans, were charged with rape of two white women and being prosecuted in a case that became renowned for racial injustice.

In later years, Bontemps said that the administration at Oakwood Junior College had demanded he burn many of his private books to demonstrate that he had given up radical politics.

This novel explores a slave rebellion that took place in 1800 near Richmond, Virginia, led by Gabriel Prosser, an uneducated, enslaved field worker and coachman.

It describes Prosser's attempt to conduct a slave army to raid an armory in Richmond, in order to defend themselves against any assailants.

Despite these rave reviews, in the midst of the Depression, Bontemps did not earn enough from sales of the novel to support his family in Chicago, where he had moved with them shortly before publishing the book.

He briefly taught in Chicago at the Shiloh Academy but did not stay at the school long, leaving for a job with the Illinois Writers' Project (IWP), under the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA).

[9] Bontemps, in addition to other work for the IWP, oversaw such young writers as Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Katherine Dunham, Fenton Johnson, Frank Yerby, Richard Durham, Kitty Chapelle, and Robert Lucas, in creating the Cavalcade of the American Negro and other works.

[10][11] In 1938, following the publication of children's book Sad-Faced Boy (1937), Bontemps was granted a Rosenwald fellowship to work on his novel, Drums at Dusk (1939).

Bontemps met Jack Conroy on the Illinois Writers’ Project, and in collaboration they wrote The Fast Sooner Hound (1942).

Bontemps was initiated as a member of the Zeta Rho chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia fraternity at Fisk in 1954.

After she earned her Ph.D. in library science, she returned to Fisk in 1965 to replace Bontemps as head librarian, becoming the first black woman to hold that position.

Bontemps collaborated with Conroy and wrote a history of the migration of African-Americans in the United States called They Seek a City (1945).

Bontemps also wrote 100 Years of Negro Freedom (1961) and edited Great Slave Narratives (1969) and The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972).

[4] Bontemps died aged 71 on June 4, 1973, at his home in Nashville, from a myocardial infarction (heart attack), while working on his collection of short fiction in The Old South (1973).

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