Langston Hughes by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

What are some restraints on the black artist tacitly imposed by white demands? By the demands of the 'respectable' black people? Why do you think he chooses not to mention his name? (1315)

The 'young colored writer' whom his fellow Negroes patronize with a dinner to which his mother is not invited was Hughes himself. When is the black artist usually recognized by his peers? (after the white world has begun to patronize him/her, 1315) The Ways of White Folks, 1314 black art, humor and music, esp. What are some topics available to the black artist? (black/white relations, cmp. What kind of religion do these latter favor? (1314, Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy. What two classes of black people does he describe? What are the goals and interests of the more 'respectable' black people? Of 'the people'? What is the attitude of the latter towad the 'negro artist'? (1314, mostly ignore him but are not ashamed of him)

What does Langston Hughes see as the mountain which stands in the way of black literary expression? (urge toward whiteness on the part of black artists, 1313) In September, when the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture - the grand collection of everything horrible and beautiful about black America - opened in Washington, D.C., visitors were greeted inside with large graven letters on the wall reading: “I, too, am America,” the last line of his 1926 poem “I, too.Selections in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticismĭuring what period was this essay written? How old was Hughes at the time of its composition? Recent scholars believe that the use of the dream trope in many of Hughes' poems inspired Martin Luther King Jr. He used the incredibly creative poetry of black language, blues and jazz to construct an Afro-American aesthetic that rarely has been surpassed.”īetween the height of the Harlem Renaissance in 1926 and the dawn of the Black Arts Movement in 1967, Hughes - who was also a social activist - wrote 16 books of poetry and more than a dozen works of nonfiction and children's books. Scholar Henry Louis Gates wrote that the genius of Hughes’ “deceptively simple” writing “lay in expressing black consciousness, interpreting to the people the beauty within themselves, and in raising the racial folk form to literary art.

Langston Hughes by Henry Louis Gates Jr.