Bontemps' poems [collected in Personals] make use of several recurring themes: the alien-and-exile allusions so often found in New Negro poetry; strong racial suggestiveness and applications; religious themes and imagery subtly used; and the theme of return to a former time, a former love, or a remembered place. On occasion he combines in a way common to lyrical writing the personal with the racial or the general. Many of these poems are protest poems; but the protest is oblique and suggestive rather...

[Black Thunder] is a superior piece of work. Interest in the action is sustained; the minds and feelings of the blacks are made lucid and believable; and the atmosphere is unique. Bontemps accomplished these ends partly through the skillful use of various motifs from Negro folklore. Several episodes of the novel are pervaded by beliefs and customs that appear in this folklore—beliefs and customs concerning death and the spirit, the importance of 'signs' or portents, and the use of Magic...

In that limited and almost barren field known as the Negro novel, Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder fills a yawning gap and fills it competently. Covering all those skimpy reaches of Negro letters I know, this is the only novel dealing forth-rightly with the historical and revolutionary traditions of the Negro people. Black Thunder is the true story of a slave insurrection that failed. But in his telling of the story of that failure Bontemps manages to reveal and dramatize through the character of his pr...

God Sends Sunday follows Nigger Heaven in its emphasis upon sex and fast living, but differs in its introduction of a main character who is a celebrated jockey and a prodigal libertine in the racing centers of the Mississippi Valley. (p. 172) In its abandonment of the Harlem background, God Sends Sunday exemplifies a new trend in fiction showing the influence of Nigger Heaven. Besides, more than any other novel in the Van Vechten tradition, it avoids race consciousness. (p. 173)

[Arna Bontemps—Langston Hughes Letters 1925–1967 constitutes] a kind of collective authority. In surveying the American literary scene for a half a century, [Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes] selected the Big Questions for literary discussion; they helped decide what trends to notice, what influences to count; they announced the up and coming young writers. They always knew how important it is for the Afro-Americanist to claim this kind of control. While their influential voices were used mos...

[The letters in "Arna Bontemps—Langston Hughes Letters 1925–1967"] were written without any awareness that they might be read by white readers. Thus they offer the general reader a rare glimpse into the candid communication between black friends. They are filled with wry comments on the ways of "white folks" and the "cullud race."… Because Hughes and Bontemps were so close as friends, they left much unsaid. Their problems with white people on wh...

Arna Bontemps' first venture in fiction ["God Sends Sunday"] is to me a profound disappointment. It is of the school of "Nigger Heaven" and "Home to Harlem." There is a certain pathetic touch to the painting of his poor little jockey hero, but nearly all else is sordid crime, drinking, gambling, whore-mongering, and murder. There is not a decent intelligent woman; not a single man with the slightest ambition or real education, scarcely more than one human chi...

Purporting to be a biography of [Frederick] Douglass, Free at Last reads more like a novel. Emphasized throughout are the protagonist's secret musings, the author's narrative omniscience and the mood of each scene. Nowhere is there probing analysis, historical perspective or sophisticated scholarship. We read much—real or imagined—in Free at Last of Frederick Douglass the man of anger, passion and resentment; but we see little of Frederick Douglass the thinker, the writer, the po...

This collection of more than forty years of correspondence [Arna Bontemps—Langston Hughes Letters (1925–1967)] is a delight…. [There] is a wealth of observation, careerist plotting and warm personal exchange between two friends trying to make their way in the American literary scene (and succeeding). We learn that Hughes was fond of baseball, Bontemps hated the cold, and both men were vain about their weight. The fact that these sons-of-the-middle-class-turned-artists were black may hav...