Genre: Information/Explanation

God Sends Sunday was the last book of the Harlem Renaissance . It was published in 1931 by one of New York's major publishers . It appeared in bookstores more than a decade after the start of the concentrated upsurge in artistic creation by African Americans , centered in Harlem , that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance . The book's author was a relative latecomer to Harlem : Arna Bontemps moved there in 1924 , after graduating from college in California . He began teaching at the Harlem Academy , and he put himself into the middle of Harlem's artistic tumult through friendships with other writers and a string of prizes that he won for his poetry in 1926 and 1927 . But the stock market collapsed in late 1929 , and the economic disorder that evolved into the Great Depression began to spread . Bontemps continued teaching while he was writing what would become God Sends Sunday . Harcourt , Brace agreed to publish the book in 1931 , and it received generally positive reviews . Yet larger forces buffeted Bontemps and those around him . As he wrote , drily , in 1968 : Within weeks after the publication of my first book , as it happened , I had been caught up in a quaint and poignant disorder that failed to attract wide attention . It was one of the side effects of the crash that brought on the Depression , and it brought instant havoc to the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties . I was one of the hopeful young people displaced , so to speak . The jobs we had counted on to keep us alive and writing in New York vanished , as some observed , quicker than a cat could wink . Bontemps's job at the Harlem Academy ended in 1931 ; he and his family moved to Alabama , where he taught at a small college and continued writing and also meeting and corresponding with those he had met in Harlem . He would eventually end up in Chicago , and then at Fisk University in Nashville , and become one of the most important chroniclers of the Harlem Renaissance and of African American literary culture . God Sends Sunday was not the last book of the Harlem Renaissance solely because it was published at a time when economic and social forces were dispersing Harlem's concentration of writers and artists . Bontemps's novel also showed some of the dissatisfaction that younger black writers felt toward what they saw as older writers' attempts to conform to white middle-class expectations about respectability and success . God Sends Sunday is a novel about a jockey in St. Louis ; it deals in violence and sex and sports and drinking and failure among African Americans , and its rendering of that world , and particularly its speech , is lyrical and vivid . W.E.B. Du Bois was among those who did not give the novel a positive review ; he criticized its lack of uplift and labeled it " a profound disappointment . " But it was this sort of perspective that Bontemps was pushing back against . So too , Bontemps based the novel's main character , Little Augie , on his Uncle Buddy – on a real life , in other words , lived by a real , complicated man . Richard Wright would most ferociously express this resistance to a Du Bois-like perspective in the late 1930s and '40s , and his work , among others ' , would represent a decisive break from that of the Harlem Renaissance . Bontemps himself would continue to push in a similar direction with his next novel , Black Thunder , published in 1936 , about a failed slave revolt in Virginia . It would become a more popular book than God Sends Sunday . But God Sends Sunday remains , as the last book of one of the most extraordinary eras of creativity in American history , a more significant milestone .