In middle school, Baldwin encountered one of the first of the great Black writers who would shape his future, the poet Countee Cullen, a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, that flowering of African American artists and writers that took place from 1918 into the 1930s. Baldwin attended DeWitt Clinton High School, a mostly Jewish high school in the Bronx, where he edited the school’s magazine with Richard Avedon (later one of America’s most famous photographers), and to which he contributed stories, poems, and plays. In high school, Baldwin was introduced to the African American painter
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