Poet, critic, playwright, novelist, historian, educator, librarian, writer of children's books, Arna Bontemps was also a voracious reader, devoted family man, pioneering Afro-American literary figure, and, above all, a champion of freedom for all people and of dignity for the individual. A writer who began to achieve prominence in the late days of the Harlem Renaissance, the multifaceted Bontemps exercised his productive genius into the 1970s, touching black and white reading audiences with a wide range of works that draw from his experience of black American culture and from his own life. Nine months younger than one of his closest friends, Langston Hughes, whom he first met in Harlem in 1924, Bontemps was not only Hughes's physical look-alike and his intellectual twin, but their names are often linked in twentieth-century literary history as coauthors, anthologists, and like-minded innovators of black American literature.

Arnaud Wendell Bontemps was born in Alexandria...