Countee Cullen  (1903–1946) LINKS Countee Cullen http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/cullen/cullen.htm This site provides visitors with essays by Cullen and others on his work, a chronology of Cullen’s life, and illustrations and photographs. Poetry Today Online: Classic Poets: Countee Cullen http://www.poetrytodayonline.com/NOVcp.html Poetry Today highlights Cullen’s achievements as well as his struggle to obtain a legacy as simply a poet, rather than to be remembered with the qualifying adjective “black.” Countee Cullen (1903–1946) http://www.unc.edu/courses/eng81br1/CULLEN.html “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black and bid him sing!” Using this line from Countee Cullen’s poem “Yet Do I Marvel” (1924), this University of North Carolina Web site page explores the issue of race in both Cullen’s life and his work. Countee Cullen http://www.nku.edu/~diesmanj/cullen.html Jill Diesman’s Countee Cullen page, from her Harlem Renaissance site, includes the text of thirteen of his poems and is adorned with a beautiful photograph of Cullen. BIOGRAPHY Born Countee L. Porter in New York City, Cullen was adopted by the Reverend and Mrs. Cullen in 1918 and raised in Harlem. He was extraordinarily precocious, and by 1920 his poems had been published in Poetry, the Nation, and Harper’s. He published his famous poem “Heritage” in 1925, the year he graduated from New York University. After earning an M.A. in English from Harvard in 1926, he taught French in a junior high school and was assistant editor of the National Urban League’s Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life. Cullen, along with Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer, was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1929. In addition to five volumes of poetry, he published a novel, One Way to Heaven (1932), which deals with the interaction between upper- and lower-class African Americans in Harlem in the 1920s.