William Stanley Braithwaite Papers

William Stanley Braithwaite was born in Boston, December 6, 1878, to William Smith Braithwaite and Emma DeWolf. He led a difficult life as a child of two mixed race parents and due to the death of his father in 1886, he left school early and joined the workforce at the age of twelve. His first employment was fortuitous; he was apprenticed in a Boston publishing house where he was exposed to the works of John Keats. Braithwaite acquired a passion for romantic poetry which drew him to a literary life. In 1903 he married Emma Kelly with whom he had seven children. Following his marriage, he committed himself even more intensely to his literary career, and completed and published his first volume of poetry, Lyrics of Life and Love (1904). He traveled to New York City in search of a career in journalism, but encountered an unfamiliar atmosphere of racial prejudice and soon returned to Boston where he found employment in 1906 as a critic and reviewer for The Boston Evening Transcript. While at The Transcript he published his first anthologies as collections of the year’s best poetry. In 1908 he completed his best-known work of poetry, The House of Falling Leaves, in which he explored the development of African-American writing in the U.S. He attempted to start up his own literary publication, The Poetic Journal and a publishing house, B.J. Brimmer, which he founded with fellow poet Winifred Virginia Jackson. Both ventures proved unsuccessful and Braithwaite was beset with financial difficulties. In 1935, after having received several honorary degrees he was offered a professorship at Atlanta University which he held until 1945. Braithwaite returned to New York City and completed his final collection of poems, Selected Poems, in 1948 and remained there until his death on June 8, 1962.