Léon-Gontran Damas papers

1949-1978

Born in Cayenne, French Guiana, in 1912, Léon-Gontran Damas was a poet, journalist, educator, and statesman who co-founded the Négritude literary movement in the 1930s with the Matinique born poet Aimé Césaire and the Senegalese author and statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor. Damas studied languages, literature, history, and ethnology, and began his career in journalism and literature in Paris in the 1930s. His first volume of poems, Pigments, appeared in 1937. He served briefly in the French army during the Second World War, and joined the French Resistance after his demobilization. Elected representative of Guiana to the French Parliament after the war, he was appointed to the High Court of Justice and served as Rapporteur of a parliamentary commission to the Ivory Coast in 1949. During the 1950s and 1960s, he lectured and traveled extensively in the Caribbean and Latin America, where he studied the influence of African culture in the New World. Appointed Distinguished Visiting Professor at Howard University in 1970, he lectured extensively at colleges and universities throughout the United States and Canada until his death in 1978.

Damas's other works include: Retour de Guyane (1938), Veilleés Noires (1944), Poèmes Nègres sur des Airs Africains (1947), Graffiti (1952), Black Label (1956), and Névralgies (1966). He also edited two volumes of poetry: Poètes Noirs d'Expression Française (1947) and Nouvelle Somme de Poésie du Monde Noir (1966). His work has been translated into English, German, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian. He was awarded the Prix Carai̤bes in 1970. He died in Washington, D.C., in 1978.