Career
After graduation, he went to New York to teach at Harlem Academy. In New York Bontemps became an important contributor to the Harlem Renaissance, where he met many lifelong friends including Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. Hughes became a role model, collaborator, and dear friend to Bontemps.
He returned to graduate school and earned a master's degree in library science from the University of Chicago in 1943. Bontemps was appointed as head librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. In that position for nearly a quarter of a century, he developed important collections and archives of African-American literature and culture, namely the Langston Hughes Renaissance Collection. He was initiated as a member of the Zeta Rho Chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia Fraternity at Fisk in 1954.
Read more about this topic: Arna Bontemps
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows whats good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your childrens infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married! Thats total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art scientific parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“A black boxers career is the perfect metaphor for the career of a black male. Every day is like being in the gym, sparring with impersonal opponents as one faces the rudeness and hostility that a black male must confront in the United States, where he is the object of both fear and fascination.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)