Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of Oct. 13th
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It is the 285th day of the year, leaving 80 days remaining in 2022.
His told his stories of the lives and struggles of Black people through poetry, novels, short stories, histories, and biographies. He wrote for children and adults. He was an integral part of the Harlem Renaissance, in which Black writers and artists explored what it meant to be a Black person in America and throughout the world.
After graduating from Pacific Union College in California, he took a teaching job in Harlem, where he started writing poetry. He began a friendship with Langston Hughes and won numerous poetry prizes.
The first poem he published was called A Record of the Darker Races, and later simply called Hope. But for Bontemps, hope was a "an empty bark."
As the Depression worsened and the Renaissance was coming to an end, Bontemps moved to Alabama, where he took a teaching job at Oakwood Junior College. In 1931, he published his first novel, God Sends Sunday, about a Black jockey who is successful at winning races, but has trouble with life. In 1936, he published what is regarded as his best novel, Black Thunder, about a slave rebellion in the early 1800s.
A few years later, he became the head librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, and his writing career continued to bloom. He wrote novels and children's stories, and he wrote a number of biographies about African-Americans that were geared to children, about Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, and George Washington Carver.
He wrote about Famous Negro Athletes, and Story of the Negro, a history book for children. He was the first Black author to win a Newberry Award for that work.
Bontemps died in 1973 in Nashville.
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