Allen Polite Papers

Writer and artist Allen Polite (1932-1993) was born in Newark, NJ. He was raised and went to school there until he was drafted into the United States Army. He served in Korea and Japan in 1952 and 1953. Polite settled in Greenwich Village, and between 1954 and 1956, studied philosophy at Columbia University. After 1958, he worked at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The writer LeRoi Jones acknowledged Polite as his 'mentor' in his Autobiography and first published Polite's poetry in 1958 in the magazine Yugen. In the early 1960s Polite worked on a novel (never completed) and a long cycle of poetry and prose called "The Dead Seeds," but he refused to publish his work. Polite's writing was included in Sixes and Sevens, An Anthology of New Poetry (Paul Breman, London, 1962), and Langston Hughes' New Negro Poets, U.S.A. published in 1964. Carlene Hatcher Polite in her first novel The Flagellants, published initially in France in 1966, featured the relationship of a young couple that is partially based on her relationship with Allen Polite.

In 1963 Polite left New York for Paris, London, and Stockholm, where he visited his friend the artist Harvey Cropper. He decided to settle in Stockholm, where he joined an international group of artists which centered on a number of black Americans already resident there. Polite began drawing and painting in addition to his writing, and in 1964 he organized and sponsored the exhibition "10 American Negro Artists Living and Working in Europe" at Den Frie, the largest gallery in Copenhagen. To support himself, Polite took a job as a clerk at CWZ Grafiska AB, a company that supplied material for the graphic industry, and subsequently gained the position of head buyer for bookbinding material. In Sweden he met Helene Etzelsdorfer who remained his companion, and later his wife, from 1963 until his death from cancer in 1993. She prepared Allen's work for publication and privately published three volumes including Poems (1996), The Rice and Fiol of the Turd Rake (1996), a 'rhapsodic play for three voices', and Looka Here, Now! (1997), poems from the 1950s.