William Stanley Braithwaite (William Stanley Beaumont Braithwaite) Biography

American poet and editor, born in Boston of West Indian parents; he attended Boston Latin School. He began his long career as literary editor with the Boston Evening Transcript in 1905. Lyrics of Life and Love (1904), his first collection of poetry, was followed by The House of Falling Leaves (1908) and Selected Poems (1948). His verse is characterized by the meditative romanticism of its themes and its accomplished use of the sonnet and other traditional forms. As an editor he was hospitable to more innovative work and contributed valuably to the development of American poetry in the earlier decades of the century. The most notable of the many anthologies of verse he produced are the seventeen annual issues of the Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry (1913–29), in which he promoted the work of Countee Cullen and others associated with the Harlem Renaissance. His other publications include the novel Going over Tindal (1924), the short stories of Frost on the Green Tree (1928), and The Bewitched Parsonage (1950), a study of the Brontës. He became Professor of Creative Literature at the University of Atlanta in 1935. The House under Arcturus (1941) is his autobiography.