Fenton Johnson Biography (Essay Sample)

Name:
Tutor:
Course:
Date:
Fenton Johnson Biography
Fenton Johnson wrote primarily between 1913 and 1920 producing memorable poems expressing desperation about race relations. He was part of the new imagistic poetry of the early twentieth century, which had Midwestern and specifically Chicago roots. A self-published writer and founding editor of two short-lived periodicals, he struggled to earn a living as a writer. Although these efforts and his attempts at social reform bore no fruits, his works have remained in print anthologies from the 1920s into the early 2000s.
Around 1918 Johnson married Cecilia Rhone, whom he called "the woman of his dreams”. He became an associate of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity and the America Authors’ League. In the 1930s, he took up a job in the Administration of Works Progress from where his later poems drew their experience. He did not publish beyond that period. Any known remaining additional works were destroyed when a basement storage area was flooded prior to his death in 1958.
Fenton was born on7th of May 1888 in Chicago to Elijah H. and Jesse Taylor Johnson. Elijah, Fenton’s father worked at the time as a railroad porter to support his family with relative financial security including owning of their house in State Street. Fenton completed his high school in Chicago, after attending Wendell Phillips and Englewood High Schools. He joined the Northwestern University in 1908 to1909 and later briefly the Chicago University. Fenton took up a job as a messenger Chicago post office before teaching English at State University (later Simmons College) in Louisville, Kentucky in 1910 to 1911. The Louisville experience was disappointing: Fenton was unpaid even the promised meager salary. He returned to come back to Chicago to work on his ambitions of literary works.
Johnson started his literary efforts when he was quite young, and in 1990, his first poem was published in a Chicago newspaper. By the time he was nineteen years old, he had written plays, which were performed at Chicago’s Pekin Theatre. However, his main genre was poetry and in the year 1913, he published his first work, A Little Dreaming; like all his work, was self-published. He dedicated the book to his grandmother, Ellen Johnson, as appreciation for sponsorship. He then decided to move to New York; with financial assistance from another benefactor, he studied journalism at the University of Columbia’s Pulitzer School. He later became a writer for Eastern Press Association before publishing his poetry volumes, the Visions of the Dusk in the year 1915 and Songs of the Soil in the year 1916.
Encouraged by positive reviews, he returned to Chicago, where he continued his journalism work. He became the chief editor of the monthly magazine, the Champion in 1916 that focused on black achievements. The magazine included articles seeking reform, which he called "The Reconcilia...