Correspondence: Jackman, Harold, 1928-1929, May

Boxes 1-6

Cullen's correspondence details his activities in giving poetry readings and occasional lectures, his assistant editorship of Opportunity, his travels to and studies in France, his teaching career at Frederick Douglass Junior High School and the friendship that former pupils retained with him, and his service on committees. Above all, his correspondence reveals his wide acquaintance with his literary contemporaries, the progress of his literary accomplishments, and his intense interest in writing.

Correspondents include: Gwendolyn Bennett, Arna Bontemps, Aaron Douglas, W.E.B. Du Bois, Owen Dodson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Harold Jackman, Charles S. Johnson, Helene Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, Dorothy Peterson, Jean Toomer, Carl Van Vechten, Eric Waldron, Dorothy West, and Walter White. Other letters by poets of the day are in the correspondence concerning Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Negro Poets, edited by Cullen.

A lively view of literary and social life and its personalities in the late 1920s and early 1930s are found in the letters of Harold Jackman, lifelong friend of Countee Cullen. In these same letters are echoes of the life led by the visiting and expatriate African American in Paris of the day. Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, and Countee Cullen were among the company that shuttled from Harlem to Paris as often as possible. Other letters that are evocative of this world are those of Dorothy West, Etienne Hervier, Stephen and Sophie Greene, and Rex Littleboy.

Among luminaries in the publishing world are Frederick A. Allen and John Farrar, editors of Harper & Bros.; Ralph Cheyney and his wife, Lucia Trent; Nancy Cunard; Benjamin Musser; Leah Salisbury, Cullen's agent; and John J. Trounstine. Included among other principal correspondents are Witter Bynner, Edith Brower, Marian C. Deane, Charles H. Marsh, E. Merrill Root, William Grant Still, Ruth Marie Thomas, Virgil Thompson, and Hale Woodruff.