Countee Cullen in Central Park, 1941
photo by Carl Van Vechten
Poet Countee Cullen, photographed in Central Park in 1941 by Carl Van Vechten.
(via backtothefiveanddime)
Zora Neale Hurston was born on this day in 1891. Here, she was photographed by Carl Van Vechten in Chicago on November 9, 1934.
Author Jean Toomer, best known as the author of “Cane,” in 1934.
Alene Lee, a Beat Generation writer best known as Jack Kerouac’s girlfriend (and the inspiration for “Mardou Fox” in The Subterraneans), with William S. Burroughs at Allen Ginsberg’s apartment around 1953. Read her story “Sisters” here.
Mary Elizabeth Vroman on the cover of Jet, October 13, 1952. Her short story, “See How They Run” was published in the June 1952 issue of Ladies Home Journal and adapted into the 1953 film, “Bright Road” which starred Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte.
Dorothy Dandridge with actor Philip Hepburn in the 1953 film, “Bright Road.” The script was based on the story, “See How They Run” by black author Mary Elizabeth Vroman after it was published in the June 1951 issue of Ladies Home Journal. Harry Belafonte was the star of the film.
Prince and Nikki Giovanni were born on Gwendolyn Brooks birthday. The original caption from this May 2, 1950 photo: A 32-year-old housewife and part time secretary has won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for “Annie Allen,” a ballad of Chicago Negro life. The first woman to capture one of the famed awards, she is the mother of a 9-year-old boy and the wife of Henry Blakely, partner in an auto repair shop.
Langston Hughes, September 1966: “Since most Negro writers from Chesnutt to Leroi Jones have found it hard to make a literary living, or to derive from other labor sufficient funds to sustain creative leisure, their individual output has of necessity often been limited in quantity, and sometimes in depth and quality as well - since Negroes seldom have time to loaf and invite their souls. When a man or woman must teach all day in a crowded school, or type in an office, or write news stories, read proofs and help edit a newspaper, creative prose does not always flow brilliantly or freely at night, or during that early morning hour torn from sleep before leaving for work. Yet some people ask, “Why aren’t there more Negro writers?” Or, “Why doesn’t Owen Dodson produce more books?” Or “how come So-and-So takes so long to complete his second novel”? I can tell you why. So-and-So hasn’t got the money. Unlike most promising white writers, he has never sold a single word to motion pictures, television or radio. He has never been asked to write a single well-playing soap commercial. He is not in touch with the peripheral sources of literary income that enable others more fortunate to take a year off and go somewhere and write.”
Model Barbara Summers in a 1970s advertisement for Avon. A novelist and fashion historian, she is the author of Black and Beautiful: How Women of Color Changed The Fashion Industry.
Poet, Novelist, Essayist and Teacher Jessie Redmon Fauset was born in an all-black hamlet called Fredericksville in what is now Lawnside, New Jersey. She graduated from Cornell University in 1905 and the University of Pennsylvania in 1919 with a degree in French. She also graduated from the Sorbonne.
The author of four novels between 1924 and 1933 (Plum Bun, There Is Confusion, The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life and Comedy, American Style) Fauset was known as “the Midwife of the Harlem Renaissance.” As literary editor of the NAACP’s “The Crisis from 1919 to 1926 under editor W.E.B. DuBois, she was amongst the first to publish the works of writers Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay and Jean Toomer.
After leaving “The Crisis,” Fauset traveled extensively, lecturing on black writers. She would go on to be a visiting professor at Hampton Institute in 1949 and teach French and writing at Tuskegee Institute. She died in Philadelphia in 1961.
