Those Winter Sundays (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Hayden was born Asa Bundy Sheffey in 1913 in the ghetto neighborhood of “Paradise Valley” in Detroit, Michigan. When his mother Gladys Ruth Finn Sheffey left her husband, Asa Sheffey, to move to New York, she gave her eighteen-month-old baby to her neighbors William and Sue Ellen Hayden, who rechristened the boy Robert Hayden. Hayden attended Detroit City College (now Wayne State University) and the University of Michigan, where he studied with poet W. H. Auden. As a student Hayden read and admired the works of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, especially Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Orrick Johns. He also studied the works of other renowned poets of the period, including Carl Sandburg and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Some of Hayden’s most famous poems appear in his first three collections: Heart-Shape in the Dust(1940), The Lion and the Archer(1948), and Figure of Time: Poems(1955). In 1943 he became a member of the Baha’i religion and adopted their belief in the unity of all religions and worldwide brotherhood. Because of his ideology, he rejected racial classification of his work, declaring himself an American poet rather than a black poet at considerable cost to his popularity. After graduating from college in 1944, Hayden embarked on an academic career; he considered himself “a poet who teaches in order to earn a living so that he can write a poem or two now and then.” Hayden taught English at Fisk University in Tennessee for over twenty years and then ended his career at the University of Michigan. In 1976 Hayden was appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. He was the first black writer to hold this position — a fact that helped confirm his stature in American literature. He died in 1980.

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