American poet, a leading figure with Langston Hughes in the Harlem Renaissance. This 1920s artistic movement produced the first large body of work in the United States written by African Americans. However, Cullen considered poetry raceless, although his 'The Black Christ' took a racial theme, lynching of a black youth for a crime he did not commit.

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must someday die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brains compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
('Yet Do I Marvel')

Countee Cullen was very secretive about his life. According to different sources, he was born in Louisville, Kentucy or Baltimore, Md. Cullen was possibly abandoned by his mother, and reared by a woman named Mrs. Elizabeth Porter, who was probably his paternal grandmother. His real mother did not contact him until he became famous in the 1920s. Cullen once said that he was born in New York City – perhaps he did not mean it literally. Porter, who died in 1918, brought the young Countee to Harlem when he was nine. At the age of 15, Cullen was adopted unofficially by Reverend Frederick A. Cullen and his wife, Carolyn. Later Reverend Cullen, founder and minister of the Salem M.E. Church, one of the largest congregations of Harlem, became the head of the Harlem chapter of NAACP.

As a schoolboy, Cullen won second prize in a citywide poetry contest and saw his winning stanzas widely reprinted. With the help of Reverend Cullen, he attended the prestigious De Witt Clinton High School in Manhattan. "He was a very energetic extrovert with a fairly high academic standing," one of his former classmates recalled. Many of Cullen's early poems appeared in the school literary magazine, The Magpie, including 'I Have a Rendezvous with Life.' During the summers Cullen worked as a bus boy at the Traymore Hotel in Atlantic City. "It is by no means a position, just a job," he said, "but it gives me time to study some of the vermin of the race, and since three-fourths of every race is vermin, I am in with the masses."

After graduating, Cullen entered New York University, where his works attracted critical attention. Cullen's first collection of poems, Color (1925), was published in the same year he graduated from NYU. Written in a careful, traditional style, the work celebrated black beauty and deplored the effects of racism. The book included 'Heritage' and 'Incident,' probably his most famous poems. 'Yet Do I Marvel,' about racial identity and injustice, showed the influence of the literary expression of William Wordsworth and William Blake, but its subject was far from the world of their Romantic sonnets. The poet accepts that there is God, and 'God is good, well-meaning, kind,' but he finds a contradiction of his own plight in a racist society: he is black and a poet.

Cullen's Color was a landmark of the Harlem Renaissance. The movement was centered in the cosmopolitan community of Harlem, in New York City. During the 1920s, a fresh generation of writers emerged, although a few were Harlem-born. Among the leading figures were Alain Locke (The New Negro, 1925), James Weldon Johnson (Black Manhattan, 1930), Claude McKay (Home to Harlem, 1928), Langston Hughes (The Weary Blues, 1926), Zora Neale Hurston (Jonah's Gourd Vine, 1934), Wallace Thurman (Harlem: A Melodrama of Negro Life, 1929), Jean Toomer (Cane, 1923), Arna Bontemps (Black Thunder, 1935), and of course Countee Cullen, a leading voice of the period. – The movement was accelerated by grants and scholarships and supported by such white writers as Carl Van Vechten.

A brilliant student, Cullen graduated from New York University Phi Beta Kappa. He attended Harvard, earning his masters degree in 1926. Cullen's column 'The Dark Tower' in the Opportunity magazine, where he worked as assistant editor, increased his literary reputation.

Cullen's Guggenheim Fellowship of 1928 enabled him to study and write abroad. Between the years 1928 and 1934, Cullen travelled back and forth between France and the United States. Prior to his departure to France he married in April 1928 Nina Yolande Du Bois, daughter of W.E.B. DuBois, the leading black intellectual. At that time Yolande was involved romantically with a popular band leader. To his friend Harold Jackman he said after meeting her for the first time: "No, she is not beautiful but one is drawn to her by some indefinable magnetism of refinement and soulful honesty."

The marriage lasted only for a year; a divorce was granted to Mrs. Cullen in Paris in 1930. "For a long time, I've had enough of love, enough of marriage," Cullen wrote in his notebook. An extra load for the marriage was Cullen's and Jackman's close friendship. Jackman was a teacher whom the writer Carl Van Vechten had used as model in his novel Nigger Heaven (1926).

By 1929 Cullen had published four volumes of poetry. Copper Sun (1927) and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927) explored similar themes as Colour, but they were not so well received.  The title piece of The Black Christ, and Other Poems (1929) was criticized for the use of Christian religious imagery – Cullen compared the lynching of a black man to Christ's crucification.

As well as writing books himself, Cullen promoted the work of other black writers. But in the late 1920s Cullen's reputation as a poet waned. His only novel, One Way to Heaven (1932), was a social comedy of lower-class blacks and the bourgeoisie in New York City. From 1934 until the end of his life he taught English, French, and creative writing at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in the New York City. During this period he also wrote two works for young readers: The Lost Zoo (1940), poems about the animals who perished in the Flood, and My Lives and How I Lost Them, an autobiography of his cat.

In 1940 Cullen married Ida Mae Robertson; they had known each other for ten years. In the last years of his life Cullen wrote mostly for the theatre. With Arna Bontemps he adapted her novel, God Sends Sunday (1931), entitled St. Louis Woman (1946, publ. 1971) for the musical stage. Its score was composed by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, both white. The Broadway musical, set in poor black neighborhood in St. Louis, was criticized by black intellectuals for creating a negative image of black Americans. Cullen also translated the Greek tragedy Medea by Euripides, which was published in The Medea, and Some Poems (1935), with a collection of sonnets and short lyrics.

As a poet Cullen was conservative: he did not ignore racial themes, but based his works on the Romantic poets, especially Keats, and often used the traditional sonnet form. "Not writ in water nor in mist, / Sweet lyric throat, thy name. / Thy singing lips that cold death kissed / Have seared his own with flame." ('2. For John Keats, Apostle of Beauty') However, Cullen also enjoyed Langston Hughes's black jazz rhythms, but more he loved "the measured line and the skillful rhyme" of the 19th century poetry. After the early 1930s Cullen avoided racial themes. "I want to be known as a poet not as a Negro poet," he once told  a New York reporter. Following the Harlem riot of 1935, he was appointed on an committee to investigate the riot and to suggest solutions for the situation.

Cullen's later publications include On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countee (1947), a collection of his favorite poems, and the play The Third Fourth of July (publ. 1946). Cullen died of uremic poisoning in New York City on January 9, 1946. Private about his life, he left behind no autobiography. Cullen's widow devoted her life after his death to the task of collecting material about Cullen and other black writers. "If you asked his family and friends about Countée," his friend and collaborator Owen Donaldson wrote, "they would tell you that he was faithful, loyal, quiet, tender."

For further reading: The New Negro by Alain Locke (1925); Cullen and the Negro Renaissance by B. Fergusson (1966); Native Sons by E. Margolies (1968); A Bio-Bibliography of Countee Porter Cullen 1903-1946 by M. Perry (1971); Black Poets of the United States by J. Wagner (1973); Many-Colored Coat of Dreams by H.A. Baker (1974); The Many-Colored Coat of Dreams: The Poetry of Countee Cullen by H.A. Baker, Jr. (1974); Black Poetry in America by B. Jackson and L. Rubin (1974); Harlem Renaissance by M. Perry (1982); Countee Cullen by Alan R. Shucard (1984); Countee Cullen by A. Shucard (1984); Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance by Houston A. Baker Jr (1987); 'Countee Cullen: A Careful Talent' in Great Black Writers by Steven Otfinoski (1994); World Authors 1900-1950, Vol. 1, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); The Atlas of Literature, ed. Malcolm Bradbury (1996; see chapter on Harlem Renaissance); Critical Essays: Achebe, Baldwin, Cullen, Ngugi, and Tutuola by Sydney E. Onyeberechi (1999); African-American Poets: Phillis Wheatley through Countee Cullen, ed. Harold Bloom (2002); The Cambridge companion to the Harlem Renaissance, ed. George Hutchinson (2007); And Bid Him Sing: A Biography of Countee Cullen by Charles Molesworth (2012)  

Selected works:

• Color, 1925
• Copper Sun, 1927
• The Ballad of the Brown Girl, 1927
• Caroling Dusk, 1927 (ed.)
• The Black Christ, and Other Poems, 1929
• One Way to Heaven, 1932
• The Medea, and Some Poems, 1935
• The Lost Zoo. (A Rhyme for the Young, but Not Too Young), 1940
• My Lives and How I Lost Them: By Christopher Cat in Collaboration with Countee Cullen, 1942 (with drawings by Robert Reid Macguire)
• St. Louis Woman, 1946 (from A. Bontemps's novel God Sends Sunday, with A. Bontemps)
• The Third Fourth of July, 1946 (with O. Dodson)
• On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countee Cullen, 1947 (selected by himself and including six poems never before published)
• My Soul's High Song; the Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, 1991 (edited and with an introduction by Gerald Early)