God Sends Sunday

Hidden in plain sight in the Beinecke Library’s James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale University lies the typescript of “God Sends Sunday,” a hitherto unknown three-act play by the Harlem Renaissance enfant terrible, Wallace Thurman. The 149-page play was only recently added to the collection’s “manuscript miscellany,” and, perhaps also accounting for its status as unknown, it shares the title of the poet Arna Bontemps’s first novel, written as Thurman was writing his God Sends Sunday , sometime between 1929 and 1931. 1 After publishing his novel, Bontemps collaborated with the poet Countee Cullen on a “straight play” of it (Bontemps), which eventually became the Broadway musical St. Louis Woman and then a Federal Theater production for which Langston Hughes was brought on board. 2