Countee Cullen

Cullen was christened Countee LeRoy Porter. He was abandoned by his parents at birth and raised by his grandmother, Mrs. Porter.
Cullen was very secretive about his early life and it is unclear where he was actually born. According to "Countee Cullen's Secret Revealed by Miracle Book" by Shirley Porter Washington he was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. Others say that he was born in Louisville, Kentucky, or Baltimore. Cullen himself said, in later life, that he was born in New York City. He did attend the prestigious Townsend Harris High School for one year before transferring to DeWitt Clinton High School (both in New York) and received special honors in Latin studies in 1922.

In 1918 his grandmother died and he was adopted by Reverend Frederick Ashbury Cullen, minister at Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem and took Cullen as his surname. Cullen was therefore raised a Methodist. Throughout his childhood his true parents never contacted Cullen although his birth mother did attempt to do so in the 1920s, after he had become famous.

Cullen won many poetry contests from a very young age and often had his winning work published for a wider readershipreprinted. At DeWitt Clinton High School his classmates mainly consisted of white, male students but he still became Vice President of his class during his senior year, was also involved in the school magazine as an editor, and was affiliated with the Arista Honor Society.

In 1922, Cullen entered New York University. His poems were published in The Crisis, under the leadership of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Opportunity, a magazine of the National Urban League. He was soon after published in Harper's, the Century Magazine, and Poetry. He won several awards for his poem, "Ballad of the Brown Girl," and graduated from New York University in 1923. That same year, Harper published his first volume of verse, Color, and he was admitted to Harvard University where he completed a master's degree.



His second volume of poetry, Copper Sun (1927), met with controversy in the black community because Cullen did not give the subject of race the same attention he had given it in Color.

He was raised and educated in a primarily white community, and he differed from other poets of the Harlem Renaissance like 'Langston Hughes' in that he lacked the background to comment from personal experience on the lives of other blacks or use popular black themes in his writing.

An imaginative lyric poet, he wrote in the tradition of Keats and Shelley and was resistant to the new poetic techniques of the Modernists. He died in 1946.

Countee Cullen's second wife Ida renewed many of the copyrights on his work when the publishers copyrights expired. However given the length of time that has passed we now believe that even this renewal has expired and it is in the public domain.