Arna Bontemps was born into a Louisiana Creole family in Alexandria, Louisiana, in 1902. When he was three years old, his family left Louisiana for Los Angeles, California, as part of the Great Migration, which was a movement of Black people out of the South to other areas of the country in an attempt to escape racial discrimination and poor economic opportunities. Bontemps moved to New York City in 1924 for a teaching position and quickly became a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, befriending other well-known writers such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Weldon Johnson. Bontemps published his first poems that same year in the literary magazines Crisis and Opportunity. In 1931, he published his first novel, God Sends Sunday. After earning a master’s degree in library science from the University of Chicago, Bontemps held a position as a librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, while continuing his writing career.

Although Bontemps was raised primarily in California, he maintained strong ties to his home state of Louisiana and to Southern Black culture. While his father encouraged him to assimilate into the white mainstream culture of California, Bontemps was deeply inspired by his grand-uncle Joe Ward, also known as “Uncle Buddy,” who educated him in traditional Black folk material.