About this Item
Color. By Countee Cullen. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, August, 1925 (H-Z). First Edition, First Printing. No dust jacket, 108 p. Half-cloth decorated binding measures 7.75 x 5", 8vo.
In good condition. Boards normally scuffed at edges and worn/bumped at corners. Head and tail of spine bumped; title label toned with scuffing, but legible. Title label on front board scuffed around edges with toning and a bit of lifting at bottom edge. Light age-staining around edges of text-block. Front and rear end-pages scuffed at fore-edges. Normal toning and sporadic age-staining through text-block. Binding intact. Please see photos and ask questions, if any, before purchasing.
Countee Cullen (born Countee LeRoy Porter; 1903-1946) is one of the most representative voices of the Harlem Renaissance. When his paternal grandmother and guardian died in 1918, the 15-year-old Countee was taken into the home of Reverend Frederick A. Cullen (c. 1868-1946), the paster of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, Harlem's largest congregation. There, Countee entered the approximate center of black culture and politics in the United States and acquired both the name and awareness of this influential clergyman who was later elected president of the Harlem chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Literary critic and Harvard professor Irving Babbitt publicly lauded Cullen's The Ballad of the Brown Girl, and in 1925, Cullen graduated from New York University, was accepted in Harvard's masters program, and published this first volume of poetry, Color.
In 1928, Cullen was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to write poetry in France, and he married Nina Yolande Du Bois (1900-1961), the daughter of W.E.B. Du Bois. Few social events in Harlem rivaled the magnitude of this marriage, and much of Harlem joined in the festivities that marked the joining of the Cullen and Du Bois lineages, two of its most notable families. Because of Cullen's success in both black and white cultures, and because of his romantic temperament, he formulated an aesthetic that embraced both cultures.
First Edition, First Printing.
RAREA1925ABCX - 06/26 - HK3595.
Seller Inventory # RAREA1925ABCX
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