Marita Bonner
One of four children, Marita Bonner
was born in Boston to Joseph Andrew and Mary Anne
(Noel) Bonner. She was raised and educated in
Boston, attending Brookline School, where she
received musical training and took the first steps
toward mastering German. In 1918 she entered Radcliffe
College, concentrating in English and comparative
literature. Attending Radcliffe at a time when
black students were routinely denied dormitory
accommodations, Bonner commuted to 
campus.
Nevertheless, she was active in campus activities,
winning the Radcliffe song competitions in 1918
and 1922. She also continued to study musical
composition and German literature. While still
a student, Bonner taught at a high school in Cambridge.
After she graduated from Radcliffe in 1922, she
moved to Washington, D.C., where she continued
her teaching career.
In Washington Bonner became closely
associated with poet, playwright, and composer
Georgia Douglass Johnson, whose "S" Street salon
was an important gathering place for many of the
writers and artists associated with the New Negro
Renaissance of the 1920s: Langston Hughes, Countee
Cullen, Jessie Fauset, May Miller, Alain Locke,
Jean Toomer, Willis Richardson, and others. She
also began to publish her writing in journals
like The Crisis, the publication of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
and Opportunity, the official journal of the Urban
League. Her first published pieces, "Hands" and
"On Being Young-a Woman-and Colored," appeared
in The Crisis in 1925.
Bonner's early essays, sketches,
stories, and plays are notable for their brief,
sometimes fragmentary character, their lyricism,
and their experimental quality. Her early works
foreshadow, however, many of the concerns that
would continue to shape her writing: solitary
narrators, often women or artists; vivid, impressionistic
imagery; a preoccupation with the lives of the
black masses; her fascination with characters
of mixed racial origins. Bonner also wrote three
experimental plays during the 1920s, all of them
allegorical explorations of the quest of black
people for freedom and dignity in the post-Emancipation
era. And in 1926 she published "Nothing New,"
her first story explicitly set in Chicago and
the introduction of what would become her fictional
universe, Frye Street.
In 1930, Bonner married William
Almy Occomy. The couple moved to Chicago, where
she lived for the next forty-one years and raised
her three children. After her marriage in 1930,
she stopped writing for a few years, then devoted
her attention exclusively to writing fiction.
She resumed writing in 1933, publishing under
her married name, and began to explore the urban
fictional terrain that would appear after her
death under the title Frye Street and Environs.
On the one hand, Bonner's Frye Street is a multiethnic
urban universe, populated by streams of people
drawn by the promises of urban life: Irish, Italian,
Jewish, Chinese, French, Russian, and south-ern
black migrants. On the other hand, Frye Street
is a fallen world, marked by sharp racial divisions
and social strife-a world in which working people,
particularly black migrants to the city, struggle
against the impersonal and destructive forces
of urban life. Bonner sought to chart this world
at a number of different levels, but her mapping
of this fictional universe was never fully realized
during her lifetime.
After 1941, Bonner rarely published
her work, but devoted herself to teaching and
raising her family. She died of injuries suffered
during a fire in her Chicago apartment in 1971.-James A. Miller
Photograph courtesy of the Radcliffe
College Archives
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