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Arna Bontemps. Lonesome Boy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955.

Arna Wendell Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, on October 13, 1902. He was raised in Los Angeles, California, and attended Pacific Union College, graduating in 1923. He moved to Harlem in 1924 and got a job teaching at the Harlem Academy, which he left in 1931. After periods in Alabama and California, he and his family moved to Chicago, where he worked in the Federal Writer's Project for the Works Project Administration. Wanting to continue in higher education and feeling the lack of a graduate degree, he enrolled in the University of Chicago, graduating with a masters in Library Science in 1943. He was hired immediately as the head librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was granted the time to pursue his well-established writing career. He died in Nashville of a heart attack, June 4, 1973.

Bontemps was a prolific writer of poetry, fiction, biographical and historical works, but he is perhaps best remembered as the author of beloved children's works. He once explained, "I began to suspect that it was fruitless of a Negro in the United States to address serious writing to my generation, and I began to consider the alternative of trying to reach young readers not yet hardened or grown insensitive to man's inhumanity to man, as it is called." The theme of the "lonesome boy" appears throughout his writing to express the feelings and predicament of the person alienated from his family and society.

The Book of the Month is curated by Kenneth Lavender, Rare Book Librarian.