Cullen publishes the novel One Way to Heaven
Poet involved
What happened
In 1932 Harper published One Way to Heaven, Countee Cullen’s only novel for adults, a social comedy set among working-class and bourgeois Black New Yorkers in Harlem. Written after his return from France and his divorce, the book turns from lyric compression to fiction about church life, class, and conversion. Reviewers noted its split tone, as if a pastel and a cartoon shared one frame.
Literary impact
The novel shows Cullen testing prose satire when the market for his poetry had cooled. Its attack on orthodoxy and mindless uniformity extends the independence he had claimed as a poet who would not write only as a racial spokesman.
Source: Wikipedia
