If any single writer can be said to represent the New Negro Renaissance, that extraordinary flowering of Afro-American arts centered in Harlem in the 1920s, that writer is almost certainly Countee Cullen. Paradoxically, he was urbane but at the same time naive, somewhat cynical, but also--and perhaps above all--romantic. A protester against violations of black dignity and rights and a questor after both African roots and racial reconciliation in America through art, Cullen manifested the yearnings and frustrations that pervaded the Harlem Renaissance in general. His work embodied the diverse qualities forged in the furnace of American racial attitudes and articulated by such intellectual leaders of the New Negro movement as W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and James Weldon Johnson. No one can be said to have more clearly reflected in literature the ideas of those men than Countee Cullen.

Early biographical information about Cullen is...