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Langston Hughes was one of the most original and versatile black writers of twentieth-century Langston Hughes, I never realizing the monumental literary portfolio that he produced. His accomplishments are well represented through his poetry, fiction, and drama. Born in Joplin, Missouri, to James Nathaniel and Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes, he was reared for a time by his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas after his parents' divorce. By his twelfth birthday he had lived in several major cities, following his mother as she was always on the move searching for a better job. Influenced by the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Carl Sandburg, he began writing creatively while still a boy. After his graduation from high school he spent time in Mexico with his father.
He has written several volumes of poetry, six novels, nine books for young people, two autobiographies, many short stories and sketches, plays, photo essays, translation, lyrics for musical and operas, radio and television scripts, recordings and numerous articles on a variety of topics. He often wrote on controversial, racial themes, portraying his people with realism. He created a Negro life in the 1920 's and 30 's, he was able to please large elements of both the white and black audience. People have accepted Langston Hughes all over the world as one of the most expressive spokesman for African Americans.
Hughes, as a product of the ' 20 s, was to some considerable extent, able to revitalize and reinvent black sounding poetry at times challenging the white control of black authenticity and black authentication. A product of the ' 30 s, he was able to bring a leftist political dimension to his work that transformed how the folk were romanticized by black poets and transformed, in some vital ways, how the black poet saw himself in relation to the community for which he wrote. He often wrote on controversial, racial topics but he wrote in such a way as to please large elements of both white and Negro audiences. The versatility of Langston Hughes made him well recognized as an important literary figure during the 1920 s, a period known as the "Harlem Renaissance." Du Bose Heyward, wrote in the New York Herald Tribune in 1926: "Langston Hughes, although only twenty-four years old, is already conspicuous in the group of Negro intellectuals who are dignifying Harlem with a genuine art life. [James Emanuel] Many black intellectuals roundly criticized much of Hughes early work for portraying what they thought to be an unattractive view of black life. In his autobiographical The Big Sea, it was well received by the literary magazines and the white press, but the Negro critics.
The Negro critics during this time were very sensitive about their race in books. Others called the book a disgrace to the race. Their feelings were that if anything white people were likely to read, they wanted to put their best foot forward. [Baxter Miller] Hoyt W. Fuller [a journalist] argued in favor of what Hughes was doing saying " Langston chose to identify with plain black people not because it required less effort and sophistication, but precisely because he saw more truth and profound significance in doing so. Perhaps in this he was inversely influenced by his father who, frustrated by being the object of scorn in his native land, rejected his own people.
Perhaps the poet's reaction to his father's flight from the American racial reality drove him to embrace it with extra fervor. "[Stephen Henderson] Hughes' poetry and writing style were somewhat overwhelmingly influential and powerful. In Hughes's own words, his poetry is about: "workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July. " In fact, the title Fine Clothes to the Jew, which was misunderstood and disliked by many people, was derived from the Harlemites Hughes saw pawning their own clothing; most of the pawn shops and other stores in Harlem at that time were owned by Jewish people. Hughes as columnist for the Chicago Defender made many political stance by creating a pluralist America where blackness became a major defining strand of being American, an ideological and artistic stance. For twenty years, he wrote forcefully about international race relations, Jim Crow, the South, white supremacy, imperialism and fascism, segregation in the armed forces, the Soviet Union and communism, and African-American art and culture. He used his poetry and prose to illustrate that there is no lack within the Negro people of beauty, strength and power, ' and he chose to do so on their own level, on their own terms. Hughes reached many people through his popular fictional character, Jesse B.
Semple. Simple is a poor man who lives in Harlem, a kind of universal, charming figure very easy for poor blacks to relate to humorous and honest way. Simples tales of his troubles with work, women, money, and life in general often reveal, through their very simplicity, the problems of being a poor black man in a racist society. "White folks, " Simple once commented, "is the cause of a lot of inconvenience in my life. " [Therman O Daniel] The black family was very important to Langston Hughes, but so were the forces that surrounded the family racial discrimination, the violence of society, the unfairness of educational opportunities, and the right to share in the American dream of opportunity and freedom. In "The Negro Mother, " Langston extols the black woman as the hope of the race. She was the one that they stole three hundred years ago from Africa's land. She was the woman who worked in the fields, the one that they beat and mistreated, and sold her children as well.
But she is nourishing "a dream that nothing could smother, deep in my breast-the "Negro Mother. " And it's through her children that the Negro mother can finally realize her dream. "Mulatto" from his autobiography, The Big Sea, was a poem that lodged a strong protest against the tragedy of mixed blood relations. It was a poem about white fathers and Negro mothers in the South. As a young man, Langston had been intrigued with the problem of those so called "Negroes" of immediate white-and-black blood, whether they were white enough to pass for white or not. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." It spoke of Black writers and poets, who were sales outs, rather than be know as a black writer would prefer to be considered a poet, not a Black poet, which to Hughes meant writing like a white poet. Hughes argued, "no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself'. [Baxter Miller] Hughes, In his writing did not confine himself to revealing just the cadences of black music to his readers, rather he wanted his audience to taste the whole of the African American experience. In an essay published in the Nation in 1926 Hughes writes: "We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.
If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad.
If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves. [Baxter Miller] Langston Hughes was a prolific writer. In the forty-odd years between his first book in 1926 and his death in 1967, he devoted his life to writing and lecturing. The major themes in his work grow out of his personal life, travels, involvement in radical and protest movements.
Hughes stated several times throughout his life that his best writing were achieved when he was in his most depressed states of mind. His poetry influenced a lot of people because he wrote from his heart and his own life experiences. After all, what could a person possibly know better than the events of their own life? Bibliography: Bibliography Berry, Faith. "Saunders Redding as Literary Critic of Langston Hughes. " The Langston Hughes Review V, no. 2 (Fall 1986). Emanuel, James A. and Theodore L.
Gross. Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America. New York: The Free Press, 1968. 191 - 221, 447 - 80. Henderson, Stephen.
Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References. New York: Wm. Morrow & Co. , 1973. Hughes, L. "Ten Ways to Use Poetry in Teaching. " College Language Association Bulletin, 1951.
Miller, R. Baxter, ed. Black American Poets Between Worlds, 1940 - 1960. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986. The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes. Knoxville: University of Kentucky Press, 1988.
O'Daniel, Therman B. Langston Hughes, Black Genius: A Critical Evaluation. For the College Language Association. New York: Wm. Morrow & Co. , 1971, 65 ff. p 171.
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Research essay sample on White And Black Langston Hughes
