A self-confident go-getter during the heady days of Harlem's creative surge, Cullen asserted his voice in the Harlem Writers Guild, a significant Harlem symposium of young artists. A Phi Beta Kappan with a B.A. in literature from New York University, he completed his studies with a thesis on the verse of Edna St. Vincent Millay. He launched his literary career as an undergraduate with Color (1925), a youthful triumph based on classical forms and introduced by "Yet Do I Marvel," one of his most anthologized titles. "Heritage" remains a masterpiece of the era's joy in a long-subdued African past.
Cullen earned an M.A. in English literature from Harvard in 1926 and married Nina Yolande, the daughter of W. E. B. DuBois, in 1928. A post as assistant editor for Opportunity (1926–1928) was significant to Cullen's literary ripening. In addition, he flourished with the column "The Dark Tower," which far outlasted a marriage doomed by Yolande's frivolity and his covert homosexuality.
While teaching French and creative writing at Frederick Douglass High School in New York City, Cullen published two volumes of conventional poetry: Copper Sun (1927), which he dedicated to wife Yolande, and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927). The second black to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, he spent a year in Paris at the Sorbonne and wrote The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929), a mediocre, self-conscious volume unworthy of his better efforts.
