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A short but enormously important biography written by Shirley Washington, his niece, a daughter of his youngest sister, titled Countee Cullen’s Secret Revealed by Miracle Book: A Biography of His Childhood in New Orleans, has at last come to shed some lights on his childhood which has never been disclosed by Cullen himself or anyone else. Now we can safely say that Countee Cullen was a combination of two personalities, James S. Carter, Jr. and Countee Cullen, And, actually, he was born in 1906, in New Orleans, Louisiana, not in 1903, in New York. In other words, he was not a native of Harlem but an immigrant like other Harlem Renaissance writers. Such disclosure of two conflicting personalities and new facts about his childhood gives us a rare chance to re-evaluate him and his literary works. We can now put in perspective why Countee Cullen was going to be a poet, not a negro poet. Also, we can understand why Cullen was trying so hard to reconcile African American experience and European literary tradition. Thanks to Washington’s biography, we are now able to situate him as a cultural hybrid who lived in the margin of two conflicting cultures. (Chonbuk University)