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Langston Hughes

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Langston Hughes (born February 1, 1902?, Joplin , Missouri , U.S.—died May 22, 1967, New York , New York) was an American writer who was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance and made the African American experience the subject of his writings, which ranged from poetry and plays to novels and newspaper columns.

While it was long believed that Hughes was born in 1902, new research released in 2018 indicated that he might have been born the previous year. His parents separated soon after his birth, and he was raised by his mother and grandmother. After his grandmother’s death, he and his mother moved to half a dozen cities before reaching Cleveland, where they settled. He wrote the poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” the summer after his graduation from high school in Cleveland; it was published in The Crisis in 1921 and brought him considerable attention. After attending Columbia University in New York City in 1921–22, he explored Harlem , forming a permanent attachment to what he called the “great dark city,” and worked as a steward on a freighter bound for Africa. Back in New York City from seafaring and sojourning in Europe, he met in 1924 the writers Arna Bontemps and Carl Van Vechten , with whom he would have lifelong influential friendships. Hughes won an Opportunity magazine poetry prize in 1925. That same year, Van Vechten introduced Hughes’s poetry to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf , who accepted the collection that Knopf would publish as The Weary Blues in 1926.

(Read W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1926 Britannica essay on African American literature.)

While working as a busboy in a hotel in Washington, D.C. , in late 1925, Hughes put three of his own poems beside the plate of Vachel Lindsay in the dining room. The next day, newspapers around the country reported that Lindsay, among the most popular white poets of the day, had “discovered” an African American busboy poet, which earned Hughes broader notice. Hughes received a scholarship to, and began attending, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in early 1926. That same year, he received the Witter Bynner Undergraduate Poetry Award, and he published “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” in The Nation , a manifesto in which he called for a confident, uniquely Black literature:

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.

By the time Hughes received his degree in 1929, he had helped launch the influential magazine Fire!! , in 1926, and he had also published a second collection of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), which was criticized by some for its title and for its frankness, though Hughes himself felt that it represented another step forward in his writing.

A few months after Hughes’s graduation, Not Without Laughter (1930), his first prose volume, had a cordial reception. In the 1930s he turned his poetry more forcefully toward racial justice and political radicalism. He traveled in the American South in 1931 and decried the Scottsboro case ; he then traveled widely in the Soviet Union , Haiti, Japan , and elsewhere and served as a newspaper correspondent (1937) during the Spanish Civil War . He published a collection of short stories, The Ways of White Folks (1934), and became deeply involved in theatre. His play Mulatto , adapted from one of his short stories, premiered on Broadway in 1935, and productions of several other plays followed in the late 1930s. He also founded theatre companies in Harlem (1937) and Los Angeles (1939). In 1940 Hughes published The Big Sea , his autobiography up to age 28. A second volume of autobiography, I Wonder As I Wander , was published in 1956.

(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on "Monuments of Hope.")

Hughes documented African American literature and culture in works such as A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (1956) and the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro (1949) and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958; with Bontemps). He continued to write numerous works for the stage, including the lyrics for Street Scene , an opera with music by Kurt Weill that premiered in 1947. Black Nativity (1961; film 2013) is a gospel play that uses Hughes’s poetry, along with gospel standards and scriptural passages, to retell the story of the birth of Jesus . It was an international success, and performances of the work—often diverging substantially from the original—became a Christmas tradition in many Black churches and cultural centres. He also wrote poetry until his death; The Panther and the Lash , published posthumously in 1967, reflected and engaged with the Black Power movement and, specifically, the Black Panther Party , which was founded the previous year.

Among his other writings, Hughes translated the poetry of Federico García Lorca and Gabriela Mistral . He was also widely known for his comic character Jesse B. Semple, familiarly called Simple, who appeared in Hughes’s columns in the Chicago Defender and the New York Post and later in book form and on the stage. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes , edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, appeared in 1994. Some of his political exchanges were collected as Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond (2016).

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A Reading Guide to Langston Hughes

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An Introduction to Langston Hughes

In  Langston Hughes ’s landmark essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” first published in  The Nation  in 1926, he writes, “An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he must choose.” Freedom of creative expression, whether personal or collective, is one of the many legacies of Hughes, who has been called “the architect” of the Black poetic tradition . He is certainly one of the world’s most universally beloved poets, read by children and teachers, scholars and poets, musicians and historians.

Langston Hughes became the voice of Black America in the 1920s, when his first published poems brought him more than moderate success. Throughout his lifetime, his work encompassed both popular lyrical poems, and more controversial political work, especially during the thirties. He expressed a direct and sometimes even pessimistic approach to race relations, and he focused his poems primarily on the lives of the working class. When he writes that an artist must be unafraid, in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” he is not only defending the need for his own work, but calling forth the next generation of poets, not only giving them permission to write about race, but charging them with the responsibility of writing about race.

He writes, in the same essay, “I am ashamed for the black poet who says, ‘I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet,’ as though his own racial world were not as interesting as any other world.” For Hughes, who wrote honestly about the world into which he was born, it was impossible to turn away from the subject of race, which permeated every aspect of his life, writing, public reception and reputation. That said, his subject matter was extraordinarily varied and rich: his poems are about music, politics, America, love, the blues, and dreams. No list could be inclusive enough. Hughes wrote poems about ordinary people leading ordinary lives, and about a world that few could rightly call beautiful, but that was worth loving and changing. Unfortunately, as with many of our great American poets ( Emily Dickinson ,  Robert Frost ), the variety and challenging nature of his work has been reduced in the public mind through the repeated anthologizing of his least political, most accessible work. His most famous poem, “ Dreams ,” is to be found in thousands of English textbooks across America. Memorized by countless children and adults, “Dreams” is among the least racially and politically charged poems that he wrote:

     Hold fast to dreams      For if dreams die      Life is a broken-winged bird      That cannot fly.

     Hold fast to dreams      For when dreams go      Life is a barren field      Frozen with snow.

Though this is a poem of hope, it seems significant that he writes, in the second stanza , “when” instead of “if,” a testimony to the difficulty of his own life, and the lives he so closely observed in his work. A later poem, “ Dream Variations ,” articulates that very dream and is only slightly less well-known, or known primarily because of the last line , which became the title of John Howard Griffin’s seminal work on race relations in the sixties.

     To fling my arms wide      In some place of the sun,      To whirl and to dance      Till the white day is done.      Then rest at cool evening      Beneath a tall tree      While night comes on gently,           Dark like me—      That is my dream!

     To fling my arms wide      In the face of the sun,      Dance! Whirl! Whirl!      Till the quick day is done.      Rest at pale evening . . .      A tall, slim tree . . .      Night coming tenderly           Black like me.

This poem is much more characteristic of how Hughes was able to use image , repetition , and his almost hypnotic cadence and rhyme to marry political and social content to the structures and form of poetry.

Some of Hughes’s major poetic influences were  Walt Whitman ,  Carl Sandburg ,  Paul Laurence Dunbar , and  Claude McKay . He also recognized W. E. B. Du Bois as a master of prose, and the long ignored stories and novels of Charles Chesnutt, which have recently gained more critical attention for both their structural complexity and political content. It was the marriage of these widely varying aesthetics,  modernism  mixed with an almost religious devotion to the power of repetition and musicality in the blues, that gave rise to Hughes’s voice, which sounded like no other voice that came before it.

Hughes once wrote, “Our folk music, having achieved world-wide fame, offers itself to the genius of the great individual American composer who is to come.” The idea of using the familiarity of music with the structural complications of other traditions is illustrated by a number of Hughes poems. Some of his poems, such as “ Po’ Boy Blues ,” are so much in the Blues tradition that it’s impossible to read them without hearing the twelve-bar blues behind the words.

     When I was home de      Sunshine seemed like gold.      When I was home de      Sunshine seemed like gold.      Since I come up North de      Whole damn world’s turned cold.

The genius here is not that the poem is so markedly different than the blues, but that presenting this form  as poetry  allowed the blues tradition the intellectual respect it deserved; putting the blues on the page demanded that they be taken seriously, and opened the door to future study and scholarship. However, just as Hughes believed that folk music would inspire a virtuoso composer to transform it, he himself transformed the language of poetry by integrating blues structures into poems such as “ The Weary Blues .”

     Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,      Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,           I heard a Negro play.      Down on Lenox Avenue the other night      By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light           He did a lazy sway . . .           He did a lazy sway . . .      To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.      With his ebony hands on each ivory key      He made that poor piano moan with melody.           O Blues!      Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool      He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.           Sweet Blues!      Coming from a black man’s soul.           O Blues!      In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone      I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—           “Ain’t got nobody in all this world,              Ain’t got nobody but ma self.              I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’              And put ma troubles on the shelf.”

     Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.      He played a few chords then he sang some more—           “I got the Weary Blues           And I can’t be satisfied.           Got the Weary Blues           And can’t be satisfied—           I ain’t happy no mo’           And I wish that I had died.”      And far into the night he crooned that tune.      The stars went out and so did the moon.      The singer stopped playing and went to bed      While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.      He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.

This poem is much more structurally complex than “Po’ Boy Blues.” The blues that appear in quotation marks are traditional in form: a line is repeated and then altered. But the poetry surrounding those “traditional” blues/lines is much more difficult to classify; each line seems to be influenced by the blues, but also makes its own form, relying on the repetition of a single rhyme for its power at the end, yet departing radically from the “expected” shape of music. At the beginning, the small, indented explanations almost seem like a longing to burst into song, which doesn’t actually happen until later in the poem. There is a modernist quality to this structure in that it borrows the technique of collage, but it isn’t implemented in quite the same way. The quotations that one finds in  Ezra Pound  or  T. S. Eliot  have the effect of dividing traditions, as if poems were being cast off the Tower of Babel. In Hughes’s work, the traditions are united.

Formally, however, the poem “ Let America Be America Again ” is far more ambitious. Like Whitman, Hughes uses the technique of  anaphora , or repetition, as a rhetorical device that unifies the disparate elements of the poem:

     I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,      I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.      I am the red man driven from the land,      I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—      And finding only the same old stupid plan      Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

     I am the young man, full of strength and hope,      Tangled in that ancient endless chain      Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!      Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!      Of work the men! Of take the pay!      Of owning everything for one's own greed!

     I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.      I am the worker sold to the machine.      I am the Negro, servant to you all.      I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—      Hungry yet today despite the dream.      Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!      I am the man who never got ahead,      The poorest worker bartered through the years.

These lines seem as if they could have been pulled straight from Whitman’s poem “ The Sleepers ” except that Hughes is rhyming at the same time, which doubly unifies the stanzas. And where Whitman’s poetry was open and inclusive, Hughes’s poem is more pessimistic about the nature of America, even angry. The opening lines, which long for the past:

     Let America be America again.      Let it be the dream it used to be.

are transformed by the end of the poem into:

     O, let America be America again—      The land that never has been yet—      And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

As an American poet, Hughes offers a call to change to his readers as an alternative to Whitman’s optimism. With both his politics and his formal innovations, he has influenced countless poets of different styles and schools in the twentieth and twenty-first century including  Yusef Komunyakaa ,  Afaa Michael Weaver ,  Kevin Young ,  Robert Creeley ,  Frank O’Hara ,  Gwendolyn Brooks ,  Rita Dove ,  Martín Espada , and others. The question for the twenty-first century reader of Hughes’s work is how to read his poems without reducing his work to politics or denying the political complexity. He himself saw the politics and poetry as inseparable writing:

Most of my own poems are racial in theme and treatment, derived from the life I know. In many of them I try to grasp and hold some of the meanings and rhythms of jazz. I am as sincere as I know how to be in these poems and yet after every reading I answer questions like these from my own people: “Do you think Negroes should always write about Negroes?” “I wish you wouldn’t read some of your poems to white folks.” “How do you find anything interesting in a place like a cabaret?” “Why do you write about black people? You aren’t black.” “What makes you do so many jazz poems?”

The formal devices, rhetoric, anaphora, and rhyme as well as his original and compelling integration of the Blues, all of which make his poems so memorable and beloved, come from a cultural tradition that had never had a voice in poetry. In that sense, Hughes’s use of forms was  itself  is political, not just the content of his poems.

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Langston Hughes

By: History.com Editors

Updated: December 15, 2023 | Original: January 24, 2023

Langston Hughes was a defining figure of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance  as an influential poet, playwright, novelist, short story writer, essayist, political commentator and social activist. Known as a poet of the people, his work focused on the everyday lives of the Black working class, earning him renown as one of America’s most notable poets.

Hughes was born February 1, 1902 (although some evidence shows it may have been 1901 ), in Joplin, Missouri, to James and Caroline Hughes. When he was a young boy, his parents divorced, and, after his father moved to Mexico, and his mother, whose maiden name was Langston, sought work elsewhere, he was raised by his grandmother, Mary Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas. Mary Langston died when Hughes was around 12 years old, and he relocated to Illinois to live with his mother and stepfather. The family eventually landed in Cleveland.

According to the first volume of his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea , which chronicled his life until the age of 28, Hughes said he often used reading to combat loneliness while growing up. “I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas,” he wrote.

In his Ohio high school, he started writing poetry, focusing on what he called “low-down folks” and the Black American experience. He would later write that he was influenced at a young age by Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico to live with his father for a year. It was during this period that, still a teenager, he wrote “ The Negro Speaks of Rivers ,” a free-verse poem that ran in the NAACP ’s The Crisis magazine and garnered him acclaim. It read, in part:

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

Traveling the World

Hughes returned from Mexico and spent one year studying at Columbia University in New York City . He didn’t love the experience, citing racism, but he became immersed in the burgeoning Harlem cultural and intellectual scene, a period now known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes worked several jobs over the next several years, including cook, elevator operator and laundry hand. He was employed as a steward on a ship, traveling to Africa and Europe, and lived in Paris, mingling with the expat artist community there, before returning to America and settling down in Washington, D.C. It was in the nation’s capital that, while working as a busboy, he slipped his poetry to the noted poet Vachel Lindsay, cited as the father of modern singing poetry, who helped connect Hughes to the literary world.

Hughes’ first book of poetry, The Weary Blues was published in 1926, and he received a scholarship to and, in 1929, graduated from, Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University. He soon published Not Without Laughter , his first novel, which was awarded the Harmon Gold Medal for literature.

Jazz Poetry

Called the “Poet Laureate of Harlem,” he is credited as the father of jazz poetry, a literary genre influenced by or sounding like jazz, with rhythms and phrases inspired by the music.

“But jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile,” he wrote in the 1926 essay, “ The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain .”

Writing for a general audience, his subject matter continued to focus on ordinary Black Americans. Hughes wrote that his 1927 work, “Fine Clothes to the Jew,” was 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."

He also did not shy from writing about his experiences and observations.

“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” he wrote in the The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain . “If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.”

Ever the traveler, Hughes spent time in the South, chronicling racial injustices, and also the Soviet Union in the 1930s, showing an interest in communism . (He was called to testify before Congress during the McCarthy hearings in 1953.)

In 1930, Hughes wrote “Mule Bone” with Zora Neale Hurston , his first play, which would be the first of many. “Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South,” about race issues, was Broadway’s longest-running play written by a Black author until Lorraine Hansberry’s 1958 play, “A Raisin in the Sun.” Hansberry based the name of her play on Hughes’ 1951 poem, “ Harlem ” in which he writes, 

"What happens to a dream deferred?

                Does it dry up

                like a raisin in the sun?...”

Hughes wrote the lyrics for “Street Scene,” a 1947 Broadway musical, and set up residence in a Harlem brownstone on East 127th Street. He co-founded the New York Suitcase Theater, as well as theater troupes in Los Angeles and Chicago. He attempted screenwriting in Hollywood, but found racism blocked his efforts.

He worked as a newspaper war correspondent in 1937 for the Baltimore Afro American , writing about Black American soldiers fighting for the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War . He also wrote a column from 1942-1962 for the Chicago Defender , a Black newspaper, focusing on Jim Crow laws and segregation , World War II and the treatment of Black people in America. The column often featured the fictitious Jesse B. Semple, known as Simple.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Hughes wrote a “First Book” series of children's books, patriotic stories about Black culture and achievements, including The First Book of Negroes (1952), The First Book of Jazz (1955), and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958). Among the stories in the 1958 volume is "Thank You, Ma'am," in which a young teenage boy learns a lesson about trust and respect when an older woman he tries to rob ends up taking him home and giving him a meal.

Hughes died in New York from complications during surgery to treat prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, at the age of 65. His ashes are interred in Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His Harlem home was named a New York landmark in 1981, and a National Register of Places a year later. 

"I, too, am America," a quote from his 1926 poem, " I, too, " is engraved on the wall of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

“ Langston Hughes ,” The Library of Congress

“ Langston Hughes: The People's Poet ,” Smithsonian Magazine

“ The Blues and Langston Hughes ,” Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

“ Langston Hughes ,” Poets.org

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Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes (1901–1967) was a poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, columnist, and a significant figure of the Harlem Renaissance. 

Born in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes was the descendant of enslaved African American women and white slave owners in Kentucky. He attended high school in Cleveland, Ohio, where he wrote his first poetry, short stories, and dramatic plays. After a short time in New York, he spent the early 1920s traveling through West Africa and Europe, living in Paris and England.

Hughes returned to the United States in 1924 and to Harlem after graduating from Lincoln University in 1929. His first poem was published in 1921 in The Crisis and he published his first book of poetry, T he Weary Blues in 1926. Hughes’s influential work focused on a racial consciousness devoid of hate. In 1926, he published what would be considered a manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance in The Nation : “The 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.”

Portrait of Langston Hughes , ca. 1960.

Photograph by Louis H. Draper

Hughes penned novels, short stories, plays, operas, essays, works for children, and an autobiography. Hughes’s sexuality is debated by scholars, with some finding homosexual codes and unpublished poems to an alleged black male lover to indicate he was homosexual. His primary biographer, Arnold Rampersad, notes that Hughes exhibited a preference for African American men in his work and his life, but was likely asexual.

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Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was a Black writer whose poems, columns, novels, and plays made him a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

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Harlem renaissance, poems, books, and other works, accusations of communism, death and legacy, who was langston hughes.

Poet and writer Langston Hughes became a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance after his first poem was published in 1921. His first book of poetry followed five years later, in 1926. One of the first Black Americans to earn a living as a writer, Hughes went on to compose many more works of poetry, prose, and plays that center the 20 th century African American experience and remain influential today. Some of his most famous poems are “Dreams,” “I, Too,” and “Harlem.” Additionally, he wrote a popular column for the Chicago Defender . In May 1967, Hughes died in his mid-60s from prostate cancer.

FULL NAME: James Mercer Langston Hughes BORN: c. February 1, 1901 DIED: May 22, 1967 BIRTHPLACE: Joplin, Missouri ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aquarius

James Mercer Langston Hughes, better known as Langston Hughes, was born in Joplin, Missouri. His birth date—likely February 1, 1901—is the subject of some debate. For decades, scholars believed his birthday was February 1, 1902, but archived newspaper evidence found in 2018 suggests Hughes was born one year earlier.

Whatever the year, his parents, James Hughes and Carrie Langston, separated soon after his birth, and his father moved to Mexico.

While Carrie moved around during his youth, Hughes was raised primarily by his maternal grandmother, Mary, until she died when he was in his early teens. From that point, he went to live with his mother, and they moved to several cities before eventually settling in Cleveland.

It was during this time that Hughes first began to write poetry, and one of his teachers introduced him to the poetry of Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman , both of whom Hughes later cited as primary influences.

Hughes was also a regular contributor to his school’s literary magazine and frequently submitted to other poetry magazines, though they ultimately rejected his work.

Hughes graduated from high school in 1920 and spent the following year in Mexico with his father. In 1921, Hughes had his first poem published; “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” appeared in The Crisis magazine and was highly praised.

Also that year, Hughes returned to the United States and enrolled at Columbia University where he studied briefly. In New York City, he quickly became a part of Harlem’s burgeoning cultural movement, what is commonly known as the Harlem Renaissance .

The young poet dropped out of Columbia in 1922 and worked various odd jobs around New York for the following year, before signing on as a steward on a freighter that took him to Africa and Spain. He left the ship in 1924 and lived for a brief time in Paris, where he continued to develop and publish his poetry.

Hughes was one of the first Black Americans to earn a living as writer. Following his first published poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in 1921, he wrote hundreds more. His poems appeared in 16 volumes of poetry during his lifetime, starting with The Weary Blues (1926). These poetry books account for roughly half of the more than 35 books Hughes published. He also wrote short story collections, novels, plays, two autobiographies, and even children’s books. His work centers the experiences of everyday African American in the 20 th century.

In 1923, the New York City magazine The World Tomorrow published Hughes’ poem “Dreams.”

“The Weary Blues”

By November 1924, Hughes had returned to the United States and worked various jobs. In 1925, he was working as a busboy in a Washington, D.C., hotel restaurant when he met American poet Vachel Lindsay. Hughes showed some of his poems to Lindsay, who was impressed enough to use his connections to promote Hughes’ poetry and ultimately bring it to a wider audience.

That same year, Hughes’ poem “The Weary Blues” won first prize in the Opportunity magazine literary competition, and Hughes also received a scholarship to attend Lincoln University, a historically Black institution in southeast Pennsylvania.

While studying at Lincoln, Hughes’ poetry came to the attention of novelist and critic Carl Van Vechten, who used his connections to help get Hughes’ first book of poetry, The Weary Blues , published by Knopf in 1926. The book had popular appeal and established both his poetic style and his commitment to Black themes and heritage.

One of the poems comprising The Weary Blues was “I, Too,” which examined the relationship of African Americans to the larger culture and society in the early 20 th century. Parts of the poem are now engraved on a wall of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

Hughes was also among the first to use jazz rhythms and dialect to depict the life of urban Black people in his work. He published a second volume of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew , in 1927.

Not Without Laughter

After his graduation from Lincoln in 1929, Hughes published his first novel, Not Without Laughter , the next year . The book was commercially successful enough to convince Hughes that he could make a living as a writer.

During the 1930s, Hughes frequently traveled the United States on lecture tours, as well as abroad to the Soviet Union, Japan, and Haiti. He continued to write and publish poetry and prose during this time, and in 1934, he published his first collection of short stories, The Ways of White Folks.

“Let America Be America Again”

In July 1936, the writer published one of his most celebrated poems, “Let America Be America Again” in Esquire magazine. The poem examines the unrealized hopes and dreams of the country’s lower class and disadvantaged, expressing a sense of hope that the American Dream will one day arrive.

Hughes later revised and republished “Let America Be America Again” in a small anthology of poems called A New Song .

In 1937, he served as a war correspondent for several American newspapers during the Spanish Civil War .

Simple Character and Stage Work

In 1940, Hughes’ autobiography up to age 28, The Big Sea , was published.

Also around this time, Hughes began contributing a column to the Chicago Defender , for which he created a comic character named Jesse B. Semple, better known as “Simple,” a Black Everyman that Hughes used to further explore urban, working-class Black themes and to address racial issues. The columns were highly successful, and “Simple” was later the focus of several of Hughes’ books and plays.

In the late 1940s, Hughes contributed the lyrics for a Broadway musical titled Street Scene , which featured music by Kurt Weill. The success of the musical earned Hughes enough money that he was finally able to buy a house in Harlem. Around this time, he also taught creative writing at Atlanta University (today Clark Atlanta University) and was a guest lecturer at a university in Chicago for several months.

Over the next two decades, Hughes continued his prolific output. In 1949, he wrote a play that inspired the opera Troubled Island and published yet another anthology of work titled The Poetry of the Negro.

In 1951, Hughes published another acclaimed poem titled “Harlem,” also known as “A Dream Deferred” based on its opening line. According to the Poetry Foundation , Hughes conceived “Harlem” as part of a book-length sequence of poems eventually titled Montage of a Dream Deferred . The collection also featured the poems “Theme for English B” and “Ballad of the Landlord.”

“Harlem” examines how the American Dream can fall short for African Americans. It opens:

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

The poem inspired the title of Lorraine Hansberry ’s play A Raisin in the Sun , and Martin Luther King Jr. referenced it in a number of his speeches.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Hughes published countless other works, including several books in his “Simple” series, English translations of the poetry of Federico García Lorca and Gabriela Mistral, another anthology of his own poetry, and the second installment of his autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander .

Tambourines to Glory

In 1956, Hughes began writing a play called Tambourines to Glory: A Play with Songs . Mixing story and song, Tambourines tells the story of two female street preachers in Harlem whose success allows them to open up a church.

Hughes told The New York Times he tried to sell the play to producers for a couple of years, eventually adapting the story into a novel—his second. It published in 1958 and received acclaim, garnering new interest in a stage production. The play debuted at the Little Theater in November 1963 with cast members including Louis Gossett Jr., Clara Ward, Hilda Simms, and Rosetta LeNoire.

Literary scholars have debated Hughes’ sexuality for years, with many claiming the writer was gay and had included a number of coded references to male lovers in his poems (as did Hughes’ major influence Walt Whitman .

Hughes never married, nor was he romantically linked to any of the women in his life. And several of Hughes’ friends and traveling companions were known or believed to be gay, including Zell Ingram, Gilbert Price, and Ferdinand Smith.

Others have refuted these claims, including Hughes’ primary biographer , who believed him to be likely asexual. But because of Hughes’ secrecy and the era’s homophobia surrounding openly gay men, there is no concrete evidence of Hughes’ sexuality.

According to The New York Times , the House Un-American Activities Committee accused Hughes of being affiliated at one time or another with 91 different communist organizations. In March 1953, the writer was called to testify in front of Senator Joseph McCarthy ’s Subcommittee on Investigations to answer questions about communist influences in his writings.

Although Hughes admitted his works might have been influenced by the ideology, he denied ever being a believer in or member of the communist party and didn’t implicate anyone else in his testimony. “My feeling, sir, is that I have believed in the entire philosophies of the left at one period in my life, including socialism, communism, Trotsky -ism. All -isms have influenced me one way or another, and I can not answer to any specific -ism, because I am not familiar with the details of them and have not read their literature,” Hughes told counsel Roy Cohn , according to transcripts.

On May 22, 1967, Hughes died from complications of prostate cancer at age 66.

A tribute to his poetry, his funeral contained little in the way of spoken eulogy but was filled with jazz and blues music. Hughes’ ashes were interred beneath the entrance of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. The inscription marking the spot features a line from Hughes’ poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” It reads: “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

Hughes’ Harlem home, on East 127 th Street, received New York City Landmark status in 1981 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. Volumes of his work continue to be published and translated throughout the world.

Langston Hughes High School, completed in 2009 and located in Fairburn, Georgia, is named after the poet. The library at Hughes’ alma mater Lincoln University also bears his name.

• An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.
• I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.
• We Negro writers, just by being Black, have been on the Blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.
• Humor is laughing at what you haven’t got when you ought to have it.
• Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
• The first two or three days, on the way home from school, little white kids, kids my age, 6 and 7 years old, who would throw stones at me. There were other little white kids, 6 and 7 years old, who picked up stones and threw them back at their fellow classmates and defend me and saw that I got home safely. So, I learned very early in life that our race problem is not really of Black against white and white against Black. It’s a problem of people who are not very knowledgeable, or have small minds, or small spirits.
• Negroes—sweet and docile, meek, humble and kind: Beware the day—they change their mind.
• I swear to the Lord, I can’t see why democracy means everybody but me.
• Like welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.
• Negro blood is sure powerful, because just one drop of Black blood makes a colored man. One drop you are a Negro!... Black is powerful.
• Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.
• Life is a system of half-truths and lies, opportunistic, convenient evasion.
• No woman can be handsome by the force of features alone, any more that she can be witty by only the help of speech.
• Jessie Fauset at The Crisis , Charles Johnson at Opportunity , and Alain Locke in Washington were the three people who midwifed the so-called “New Negro Literature” into being. Kind and critical—but not too critical for the young—they nursed us along until our books were born .

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The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

50 pages • 1 hour read

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Summary and Study Guide

Summary: “the negro artist and the racial mountain”.

In Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” the writer presents his argument regarding the creative limitations Black Americans face. Initially published in 1926, the essay traces a short, powerful argument that relies both on Hughes’s own identity as an artist as well as his critical observations of US society. As a Black author writing in the early 20th century, Hughes uses the terms “Negro” and “black” interchangeably; this study guide exclusively uses the more current term “Black” to adhere as closely as possible to Hughes’s original linguistic intentions. This study guide refers to an electronically published version of the essay via the Poetry Foundation’s website, which can be accessed here: www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69395/the-negro-artist-and-the-racial-mountain. This essay is published in many versions; for ease of access, quotations in this guide are cited in reference to the number of the paragraph in which they appear.

Hughes opens his essay with an anecdote regarding a “promising” young Black poet’s statement that he doesn’t want to be “a Negro poet” (Paragraph 1). Hughes interprets the young poet’s reluctance as an expression of both self-hatred and a desire to be White. Using this statement as a framework for his argument, Hughes describes ways that Black people are taught to hate their Blackness while they simultaneously desire Whiteness. Hughes complicates this argument by integrating his understanding of class: middle-class Black people are more likely to try to follow White cultural patterns, while the “common people” (Paragraph 4) are less afraid to be themselves.

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One of the central tenets of Hughes’s essay is that Black artists must embrace their “racial individuality” (Paragraph 5), and all this individuality encompasses, rather than seek assimilation. To illustrate this point, Hughes describes a Black woman who owns her own club in Philadelphia, where she chose to employ a White woman to sing folksongs but refused to hire a Black woman to do the same. This resistance to Blackness, Hughes argues, is present in many aspects of Black life.

Because the Black community is unable to embrace and love their own Blackness, Hughes describes the road “for the serious black artist…who would produce a racial art… [as] rocky” (Paragraph 7). Not only must the Black artist work against his own community’s critique, but he must also live with the more obvious disapproval and potential censure from a White audience .

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Hughes feels strongly that his Blackness is an essential part of his own artistic practice. He states his wish for all Black artists, desiring a sense of freedom for them as well as for himself. According to Hughes, the new Black artists who are willing to “express [their] individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame” (Paragraph 14) will create a new artistic world, standing “on top of the mountain , free within [them]selves” (Paragraph 14). In this closing statement to the essay, Hughes drives home his point that neither assimilation nor self-hatred serve the Black artist; instead, self-love, honesty, and independence will lead to both artistic and cultural freedom.

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ARTS & CULTURE

A lost work by langston hughes examines the harsh life on the chain gang.

In 1933, the Harlem Renaissance star wrote a powerful essay about race. It has never been published in English—until now

Steven Hoelscher

It’s not every day that you come across an extraordinary unknown work by one of the nation’s greatest writers. But buried in an unrelated archive I recently discovered a searing essay condemning racism in America by Langston Hughes—the moving account, published in its original form here for the first time, of an escaped prisoner he met while traveling with Zora Neale Hurston.

In the summer of 1927, Hughes lit out for the American South to learn more about the region that loomed large in his literary imagination. After giving a poetry reading at Fisk University in Nashville, Hughes journeyed by train through Louisiana and Mississippi before disembarking in Mobile, Alabama. There, to his surprise, he ran into Hurston, his friend and fellow author. Described by Yuval Taylor in his new book Zora and Langston as “one of the more fortuitous meetings in American literary history,” the encounter brought together two leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. On the spot, the pair decided to drive back to New York City together in Hurston’s small Nash coupe.

The terrain along the back roads of the rural South was new to Hughes, who grew up in the Midwest; by contrast, Hurston’s Southern roots and training as a folklorist made her a knowledgeable guide. In his journal Hughes described the black people they met in their travels: educators, sharecropping families, blues singers and conjurers. Hughes also mentioned the chain gang prisoners forced to build the roads they traveled on.

A Literary Road Trip

Three years later, Hughes gave the poor, young and mostly black men of the chain gangs a voice in his satirical poem “Road Workers”—but we now know that the images of these men in gray-and-black-striped uniforms continued to linger in the mind of the writer. In this newly discovered manuscript, Hughes revisited the route he traveled with Hurston, telling the story of their encounter with one young man picked up for fighting and sentenced to hard labor on the chain gang.

I first stumbled upon this Hughes essay in the papers of John L. Spivak, a white investigative journalist in the 1920s and 1930s, at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Not even Hughes’ authoritative biographer Arnold Rampersad could identify the manuscript. Eventually, I learned that Hughes had written it as an introduction to a novel Spivak published in 1932, Georgia Nigger . The book was a blistering exposé of the atrocious conditions that African-Americans suffered on chain gangs, and Spivak gave it a deliberately provocative title to reflect the brutality he saw. Scholars today consider the forced labor system a form of slavery by another name. On the final page of the manuscript (not reproduced here), Hughes wrote that by “blazing the way to truth,” Spivak had written a volume “of great importance to the Negro peoples.”

Hughes titled these three typewritten pages “Foreword From Life.” And in them he also laid bare his fears of driving through Jim Crow America. “We knew that it was dangerous for Northern Negroes to appear too interested in the affairs of the rural South,” he wrote. (Hurston packed a chrome-plated pistol for protection during their road trip.)

But a question remained: Why wasn’t Hughes’ essay included in any copy of Spivak’s book I had ever seen? Buried in Spivak’s papers, I found the answer. Hughes’ essay was written a year after the book was published, commissioned to serve as the foreword of the 1933 Soviet edition and published only in Russian.

In early 1933, Hughes was living in Moscow, where he was heralded as a “revolutionary writer.” He had originally traveled there a year earlier along with 21 other influential African-Americans to participate in a film about American racism. The film had been a bust (no one could agree on the script), but escaping white supremacy in the United States—at least temporarily—was immensely appealing. The Soviet Union, at that time, promoted an ideal of racial equality that Hughes longed for. He also found that he could earn a living entirely from his writing.

For this Russian audience, Hughes reflected on a topic as relevant today as it was in 1933: the injustice of black incarceration. And he captured the story of a man that—like the stories of so many other young black men—would otherwise be lost. We may even know his name: Hughes’ journal mentions one Ed Pinkney, a young escapee whom Hughes and Hurston met near Savannah. We don’t know what happened to him after their interaction. But by telling his story, Hughes forces us to wonder.

Foreword From Life

By Langston Hughes

I had once a short but memorable experience with a fugitive from a chain gang in this very same Georgia of which [John L.] Spivak writes. I had been lecturing on my poetry at some of the Negro universities of the South and, with a friend, I was driving North again in a small automobile. All day since sunrise we had been bumping over the hard red clay roads characteristic of the backward sections of the South. We had passed two chain gangs that day This sight was common. By 1930 in Georgia alone, more than 8,000 prisoners, mostly black men, toiled on chain gangs in 116 counties. The punishment was used in Georgia from the 1860s through the 1940s. , one in the morning grading a country road, and the other about noon, a group of Negroes in gray and black stripped [sic] suits, bending and rising under the hot sun, digging a drainage ditch at the side of the highway. Adopting the voice of a chain gang laborer in the poem “Road Workers,” published in the New York Herald Tribune in 1930, Hughes wrote, “Sure, / A road helps all of us! / White folks ride — /And I get to see ’em ride.” We wanted to stop and talk to the men, but we were afraid. The white guards on horseback glared at us as we slowed down our machine, so we went on. On our automobile there was a New York license, and we knew it was dangerous for Northern Negroes to appear too interested in the affairs of the rural South. Even peaceable Negro salesmen had been beaten and mobbed by whites who objected to seeing a neatly dressed colored person speaking decent English and driving his own automobile. The NAACP collected reports of violence against blacks in this era, including a similar incident in Mississippi in 1925. Dr. Charles Smith and Myrtle Wilson were dragged from a car, beaten and shot. The only cause recorded: “jealousy among local whites of the doctor’s new car and new home.” So we did not stop to talk to the chain gangs as we went by.

But that night a strange thing happened. After sundown, in the evening dusk, as we were nearing the city of Savannah, we noticed a dark figure waving at us frantically from the swamps at the side of the road. We saw that it was a black boy.

“Can I go with you to town?” the boy stuttered. His words were hurried, as though he were frightened, and his eyes glanced nervously up and down the road.

“Get in,” I said. He sat between us on the single seat.

“Do you live in Savannah?” we asked.

“No, sir,” the boy said. “I live in Atlanta.” We noticed that he put his head down nervously when other automobiles passed ours, and seemed afraid.

“And where have you been?” we asked apprehensively.

“On the chain gang,” he said simply.

We were startled. “They let you go today?” In his journal, Hughes wrote about meeting an escaped convict named Ed Pinkney near Savannah. Hughes noted that Pinkney was 15 years old when he was sentenced to the chain gang for striking his wife.

“No, sir. I ran away. In his journal, Hughes wrote about meeting an escaped convict named Ed Pinkney near Savannah. Hughes noted that Pinkney was 15 years old when he was sentenced to the chain gang for striking his wife. That’s why I was afraid to walk in the town. I saw you-all was colored and I waved to you. I thought maybe you would help me.”

Gradually, before the lights of Savannah came in sight, in answer to our many questions, he told us his story. Picked up for fighting, prison, the chain gang. But not a bad chain gang, he said. They didn’t beat you much in this one. Guard-on-convict violence was pervasive on Jim Crow-era chain gangs. Inmates begged for transfers to less violent camps but requests were rarely granted. “I remembered the many, many such letters of abuse and torture from ‘those who owed Georgia a debt,’” Spivak wrote. Only once the guard had knocked two teeth out. That was all. But he couldn’t stand it any longer. He wanted to see his wife in Atlanta. He had been married only two weeks when they sent him away, and she needed him. He needed her. So he had made it to the swamp. A colored preacher gave him clothes. Now, for two days, he hadn’t eaten, only running. He had to get to Atlanta.

“But aren’t you afraid,” [w]e asked, “they might arrest you in Atlanta, and send you back to the same gang for running away? Atlanta is still in the state of Georgia. Come up North with us,” we pleaded, “to New York where there are no chain gangs, and Negroes are not treated so badly. Then you’ll be safe.”

He thought a while. When we assured him that he could travel with us, that we would hide him in the back of the car where the baggage was, and that he could work in the North and send for his wife, he agreed slowly to come.

“But ain’t it cold up there?” he said.

“Yes,” we answered.

In Savannah, we found a place for him to sleep and gave him half a dollar for food. “We will come for you at dawn,” we said. But when, in the morning we passed the house where he had stayed, we were told that he had already gone before daybreak. We did not see him again. Perhaps the desire to go home had been greater than the wish to go North to freedom. Or perhaps he had been afraid to travel with us by daylight. Or suspicious of our offer. Or maybe [...] In the English manuscript, the end of Hughes’ story about the convict trails off with an incomplete thought—“Or maybe”—but the Russian translation continues: “Or maybe he got scared of the cold? But most importantly, his wife was nearby!”

Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates. Copyright 1933 by the Langston Hughes Estate

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Steven Hoelscher | READ MORE

Steven Hoelscher is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Langston Hughes papers

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Scope and Contents

The career of James Langston Hughes spanned five decades. He wrote poetry, short stories, plays, newspaper columns, children's books, and pictorial histories. He also edited several volumes of prose and fiction by Afro-American and African writers. Through his writing and through his extensive travels and lecture tours he came into direct contact with an amazing array of writers, artists, activists, and performers. The papers span the years 1862-1980. The papers are housed in 643 boxes and are arranged in 22 series: Personal Correspondence , Professional Correspondence , Family Correspondence , Third Party Correspondence , General Writings , Poems , Song Lyrics , Newspaper Columns , Translations by Langston Hughes , Printed Appearances of Hughes's Writings , Writings of Others , Photographs , Public Appearances , Personal Papers , Family Papers , Financial and Legal Papers , Printed Ephemera , Clippings , Periodicals and Pamphlets collected by Hughes , Materials Removed from Printed Items , World Festival of Negro Arts [Dakar] , and Graphic Materials , Oversize materials are stored in boxes 588-638. Series I-IV list the varied types of correspondence in the Hughes papers: Personal Correspondence , Professional Correspondence , Family Correspondence , and Third Party Correspondence . Though these subdivisions indicate the broad nature of the material, there are several characteristics germane to the correspondence as a whole. Because the letters were sorted in Hughes's possession before coming to Yale, and then rearranged several times during the 1970s, it is difficult to trace any true "original arrangement". However, certain categories of letters seem to have been created by Hughes and were respected by earlier Yale catalogers. During the current processing project, efforts were made to keep like items together (if any sense of original order was present), and at the same time, archival principles were applied to make the material fit an intellectual arrangement that would aid researchers. Names have been checked against Library of Congress authority records (while some variants have been kept in parentheses); unidentified letters have been checked against obvious possible matches; some groups of letters have been kept together because they were determined to be most valuable kept that way (instead of being broken up and filed individually); groups of letters listed by genre have appended notes indicating significant correspondents present. Drafts of letters by Hughes, formerly segregated into a subsection (under "Hughes") have been interfiled into the folders of the party addressed. Several folders of original letters from Hughes which were acquired over the years from other parties have been removed and will be cataloged in a separate Hughes collection, per standard library practice. Researchers familiar with older versions of this finding aid will find that many names have been added, as letters were taken from "letter general" folders and listed separately. A few names may be missing, due to efforts to regularize authoritative names of correspondents. (These should match Library of Congress forms, which provide cross-references.) Series I, Personal Correspondence , contains the bulk of the letters received by Hughes during his lifetime. They include early items, from childhood friends and classmates, and continue to the end of his life, including letters postmarked the day he died, May 22, 1967. A wide variety of people is represented here, fellow writers; artists; editors; musicians and composers; politicians, and activists such as: Arna Bontemps; Gwendolyn Brooks; Margaret Bonds; Owen Dodson; Jessie Fauset; Dorothy Peterson; Amy Spingarn; and Carl Van Vechten. Hughes took much interest in the careers of younger African-American, African, Caribbean, and Central American writers such as: Leroi Jones; Ted Joans, and Alice Walker. His involvement with writers' groups, civil rights committees, and church organizations is also evident. Publishers and publications with which Hughes had long-term relationships are listed here. (Other publishers are listed in Series II.) Correspondence with colleges and universities is present here. Schools with which Hughes had a long-term or more involved relationship are listed in individual folders, while briefer, or uncompleted arrangements are housed within "letter general" folders. The same rule applies to civic groups for which Hughes lectured; many are listed individually, while others are to be found in "letter general" folders. While the majority of fan mail is listed in Series II, groups of letters from fans who became friends of Hughes over time are listed here. The other sections of this series are: Groups, which comprises letters concerning Hughes' 1931-32 lecture tour and letters of introduction for his 1931 trip to Haiti; Drafts, which consists of letters written in shorthand by a secretary, drafts of telegrams, templates for form letters sent by Hughes (such as answers to aspiring writers); and Christmas cards made by or for Hughes. The final materials in Series I are boxes of greeting cards and invitations, which provide snapshots of Hughes's social life and circle from the 1930s through the 1960s. Series II, Professional Correspondence , contains four subseries of correspondence. Letters in the first subseries, Minor Publishers, Publications, and Agents share the characteristic of being from entities that either courted Hughes to no avail, or only published one or two items by him. Fan Mail relates to published works by Hughes (including many in response to his syndicated columns), general letters from fans, or from special categories of readers, such as members of the armed forces, prisoners, and students. The Foreign Mail subsection is a mixture of many things, in part because it was categorized as such when it was received by the library. The meaning of "foreign" can be: from a foreign writer living in a foreign country; from an American writer living in a foreign country; letters in a non-English language (no matter where they were posted); or concerning a foreign subject (such as a translation of a work by Hughes). This subseries was analyzed and any significant letters have been moved to Series I, where they have been filed individually (such as with several prominent African writers). What remains, then, is a mixture of fan mail and minor publisher correspondence. The final subseries contains Form Letters. These are generic mailings of informative flyers, solicitations, or newsletters. Many of the organizations listed in Series I can also be found here. The difference between the two, to use an example, is this: letters to and from Hughes as a member of The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) concerning particular issues and business are found in Series I; newsletters and general announcements of events are found in Form Letters in Series II. Series III, Family Correspondence , contains letters to and from Hughes to his relatives as well as exchanges between other family members. Letters are present from his mother, Carolyn Clark, his brother, Gwyn Clark, and his father, James Hughes. One other group of materials present is several folders of sympathy letters sent to his family following Hughes's death. (Letters from Toy and Emerson Harper, who were not in reality his biological "aunt" and "uncle" are filed in Series I.) Series IV, Third Party Correspondence , consists of various letters between Hughes's friends and acquaintances. The majority of these were likely pulled from incoming letters to Hughes during an earlier processing project. Groups of letters, probably given to Hughes by the recipients, include letters relating to "The Poetry of the Negro", addressed to Arna Bontemps; letters to Hughes's agent, Maxim Lieber; and letters to his speaking tour arranger, W. Colston Leigh. Series V, General Writings , contains works by Hughes exclusive of poems and song lyrics, which are organized in Series VI and VII. (However, manuscripts of book-length collections of poems are found here.) This series is organized into two subseries. The first, Works by Title, is an alphabetical listing of the major works by Hughes, spanning plays, short stories, autobiographical writings, criticism, reportage, stage shows, anthologies, collection of black folklore, humor, and radio and television skits. There is material intended for a wide audience; children and adults; black and white. Some of Hughes's most well known works are present in several draft stages. The second subseries, Short Works by Subject, gathers together various works around themes. Among the items found here are reviews (of books, films, film scenarios, and plays), introductions to books, record album liner notes, short story notes, short pieces (recommendations, statements and tributes about books, events and topics, and people). At the end of this subsection are several folders of notes and fragments. It should be noted that some early writings by Hughes are not present in manuscript form (such as drafts of most of the stories that comprise "Ways of White Folks") in Series V. These were most likely not saved, or given to friends or other libraries with manuscript collections of African-American authors. As well, many typescripts have generally been described as "drafts" though they may well simply be copies made at a later date for presentation to readers. Series VI, Poems , contains a great number of verses written by Hughes and is organized into Single Poems and Groups, which are both arranged alphabetically by title. Groups of poems are gatherings done either by Hughes under a title (e.g. "Blues and Dixieland Poems") or for a specific project (e.g. "Poems read by Langston Hughes at Carver Program"). (Book-length collections of poems are found in Series V. General Writings ). The last section of Groups is made up of translations, arranged alphabetically by language. Versions of most of Hughes best-known poems are included here, many in holograph and typewritten versions. Series VII, Song Lyrics , contains texts which Hughes intended to be set to music. (Many items, however, began life as poems, but were later revised to be set to music. Therefore, there is a certain amount of duplication of titles between this series and Series VI, Poems.) Hughes wrote in a wide range of idioms: Jazz, Blues, Gospel, and Popular Song. A few of his songs gained wide popularity, mainly those written for stageshows, which got the widest exposure, and remained in repertoire. The first section of this series consists of Single Lyrics, which are arranged alphabetically by title. The second section is made up of Groups of lyrics, which were gathered together by title (e.g. Tambourines to Glory) and by theme (e.g. Life is Fine (Four Bawling Ballads)). Where known, the name of the musical composer has been listed. Descriptions of musical settings have been written in accordance to musical cataloging standards in use at the Yale Music Library. Many titles, then, appear in parallel listings, with separate entries for song lyrics and for musical settings (indicated by the addition of the qualifier "music" after the title). In this latter category, there also exist several pieces which appear as music only (i.e. no extant lyrics). The Beinecke Library also owns printed sheet music for many of Hughes's songs (many donated by Hughes). These have been cataloged separately as printed items. Many of Hughes musical projects were for complete shows. The most well-known venture was with Kurt Weill, for the 1947 musical "Street Scene", from which came the hit parade song "Moon-faced, Starry-eyed" and the jazz standard, "Lonely House" (also known as "Lonely Home"). Hughes had two more musicals on Broadway: "Simply Heavenly" (based on his Simple stories) in 1957; and "Tambourines to Glory" in 1963, both of which included original songs. While the songs for these shows are found here, manuscripts of the books for these are in Series V, General Writings . (Texts for longer classical works, such as the cantata "The Glory Around His Head," are also found in Series V, as are all materials for "Black Nativity," since Hughes used traditional spirituals and created a play around them.) Series VIII, Newspaper Columns , contains drafts and printed versions of the majority of the weekly columns Hughes wrote for the Chicago Defender and the New York Post between 1942-1966. Reprints in several other newspapers are also included. While the columns are best known for the ongoing tale of Jesse B. Semple (i.e. "Simple"), they also comment on social and political issues of the period. Several original clippings from the late 1940s were docketed as evidence in a Chicago court case concerning the origin of the term "Daddy-o". Examples of these can be found in folder 9200a. NOTE: Due to their highly embrittled condition, printed columns have been photocopied onto acid-free paper for research use. Originals have been stored separately. Series IX, Translations by Langston Hughes , gathers various works translated by Hughes from works by other authors. Many of these are Spanish and French language writers, including: Federico Garcia Lorca ("Fate at the Wedding" and "Gypsy Ballads"); Nicolas Guillèn ("Cuba Libre"); Gabriela Mistral ("Selected Poems"); and Jacques Roumain ("Masters of the Dew"). Series X, Printed Appearances of Hughes's Writings , compiles various published works by Hughes. While printed books are cataloged separately, it is general Beinecke practice to include items clipped from magazines as part of general writings series. However, because these materials from Hughes's papers had been stored separately for years, a decision was made not to interfile them. They have been arranged to mirror the organization of preceding series. This series represents a fair example of printed appearances of Hughes's works, but is, by no means, complete. Series XI, Writings of Others , is organized into two subseries. The first contains Writings of Others about Langston Hughes, such as critical essays, poems in homage, biographical sketches, and drafts of theses. The second subseries contains General Writings by a wide range of writers, including friends of Hughes, fans, and students. Most materials in this subseries have been identified only by material type [e.g. "poem" or "play"]. Titles of works have been given for well-known writers [e.g. Alice Walker]. Series XII, Photographs , consists of 12 subseries. The first subseries contains Candid Portraits and Snapshots of Langston Hughes, The following subseries, Photographers' Portraits of Langston Hughes, features works by such artists as James Allen, Richard Avedon, Gordon Parks, Irving Penn, and Edward Weston. The third subseries is a folder of photographs showing Langston Hughes in Paintings and Sculpture. Images of Hughes's family can be found in the next subseries. The bulk of material in this series is found in the fifth subseries, Langston Hughes Chronology, which traces Hughes's life from 1902 through 1967, recording friends, school years, trips, lectures, and appearances. These images were received from Hughes's estate, but were originally filed among general images in the James Weldon Johnson Collection. They were reunited with Hughes's papers and arranged chronologically. Among the best-documented periods are Hughes's trips to Cuba and Haiti in 1931, his trip to the Soviet Union in 1932-33 (which includes many official news agency photos), the Spanish Civil War, and his European trips of the 1960s. A wide selection of photographs of People and Groups of People follow in the next subseries. Next are Productions of Works by Hughes, such as "Black Nativity," "Don't You Want to Be Free," and "Prodigal Son". Art Photographs contains works by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Griffith Davis, Roy De Carava, and Marian Palfi, among others. The remaining subseries are: Artworks (photographs documenting art in other media); Places; and Other Subjects (such as exhibitions about Hughes). Series XIII, Public Appearances , is a chronological gathering of materials that document Hughes's frequent lectures and speaking engagements. As noted in Processing Notes, this series was arranged sometime in the past and contains materials that might otherwise have been classed in other series, but was kept in the existing order becasue of its value to researchers. This series, then, is not complete and many other items documenting Hughes's public appearances can also be found in most of the other series. Series XIV, Personal Papers , is organized into 17 subseries which provide an eclectic view into Hughes's life. The subseries are arranged alphabetically and are: Addresses (on cards, in books and on lists); Bibliographical Material (which serve to document Hughes's publishing history); Engagement Books and Calendars; Journals (mostly from his early life, ca. 1920s-30s); Lists of Miscellaneous Subjects; Memos (which are principally jotted notes and desk reminders, but also include some other types of items, mainly from the 1920s and 1930s); Music Material; Notebooks; Notes (which appear to not be related directly to any specific work by Hughes); Objects (including a fraternity hat, a cigarette case from Carl Van Vechten, and a tambourine used in "Tambourines to Glory"); Project Files (mainly concerning committees and organizations); School Materials (documenting Hughes's education); Scrapbooks; Teaching Materials (Hughes as instructor); Transcripts of Interviews and Roundtables; Travel Documents; and Other Papers (such as an advertisement of Hughes for Smirnoff Vodka, membership and identity cards, rent party cards, and Hughes's will). Series XV, Family Papers , is divided into 15 subseries, for members of Hughes's family, including Clark, Hughes, Langston, Miller and some general items. Material documenting his mother, Carolyn Clark, and father, James N. Hughes, include a marriage certificate, diaries, passports, and a will. Included here is a "baby letter" written by Langston Hughes to his aunt Carolyn Battle, ca. 1907, and a note regarding genealogy. Series XVI, Financial and Legal Papers , is organized into 14 subseries for types of records: Checking accounts; Contracts; Copyright and Publication Registrations; Employee Records (persons working for Hughes); Expense Records (for shipping archives to Yale University); Financial Memos; Income Statements; Income Tax; Insurance; Invoices and Royalty Statements; Legal Documents; Loans; Receipts; and Stock. Series XVII, Printed Ephemera , gathers together items such as theater programs, advertising cards, and flyers and is organized into 3 subseries. The first two are: About Langston Hughes (separated into general mentions and appearances); and About Hughes's Works. The last subseries concerns General Subjects, such as African topics, black subjects, humanitarian committees, newsletters and bulletins, performances (works not by Hughes), and publication announcements (also works not by Hughes). Series XVIII, Clippings , follows the arrangement of Printed Ephemera , but includes several more subseries, totaling seven. In the subseries About Langston Hughes, general mentions and appearances are interfiled. A small group of Specific Topics involving Hughes follows. The next subseries is About Hughes's Works. The fourth subseries is about People, followed by General Arts ands General Subjects. The final subseries consists of Clippings from Isabella Brown. Brown, a long-time fan, whose many letters can be found in Series I, Personal Correspondence , sent Hughes hundreds of clippings and collages between 1950 and 1967, incorporating advertising and comic book images. Series XIX, Periodicals and Pamphlets collected by Hughes , consists of issues of magazines which were not cataloged separately. These were retained in the archive to provide a snapshot of some of Hughes's reading interests. Series XX, Materials Removed from Printed Items , is made up of items (such as publishers' cards) that were formerly inserted into printed works that have been cataloged separately. Series XXI, World Festival of Negro Arts [Dakar] , is an assortment of printed material collected by Hughes concerning this event, including official committee records and transcripts of speeches. Series XXII, Graphic Materials , gathers together in nine subseries various image materials collected by Hughes. Among the Artwork Originals are works by such artists as Roy De Carava, Ted Joans, and Prentiss Taylor. Artworks by Langston Hughes are mainly pencil sketches and block cut prints. Images of Langston Hughes contains a painting by Amy Spingarn as well as various printed images of Hughes. Following a group of correspondence cards from the Spanish Civil War is a collection of Images of Famous Figures in African-American History, which were likely used in either Famous American Negroes or Pictorial History of the Negro in America . Two boxes of postcards record Hughes's travels around the world and also contain a group of humorous images of African Americans collected by Hughes. Many of the Posters are for productions of plays by Hughes or for appearances by Hughes, but also include boxing and bullfighting posters from Mexico and a series of posters for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, among others. The final two subseries are groups of printed images, mainly of people, and several printing blocks. Oversize material is housed in boxes 588-638 and contains items from Series V, VI, VII, X, XII, XIV, XV, XVII, XVIII, and XXII. Restricted Fragile Papers (boxes x-xx) contains fragile originals for which preservation photocopies have been made for reference use and filed in the regular series run.

• Hughes, Langston, 1902-1967

Conditions Governing Access

The materials are open for research. Boxes 639-667 and items in cold storage (including box 669): Restricted fragile material. Reference surrogates have been substituted in the main files. For further information consult the appropriate curator.

Existence and Location of Copies

Microfilm for several items available. Consult Public Services desk.

Conditions Governing Use

The Langston Hughes Papers are the physical property of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Literary rights, including copyright, belong to the authors or their legal heirs and assigns. For further information, consult the appropriate curator.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Gift of Langston Hughes and bequest of the estate of Langston Hughes, ca. 1940-1967, with additions from other sources, ca. 1940-1980.

305 Linear Feet ((673 boxes) + 1 art, 11 broadside)

Language of Materials

Catalog record.

A record for this collection is available in Orbis, the Yale University Library catalog

Persistent URL

https://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/beinecke.hughes

Additional Description

The Langston Hughes Papers contain letters, manuscripts, personal items, photographs, clippings, artworks, and objects that document the life of the well-known African-American poet.

LANGSTON HUGHES (1902-1967)

The Life of Langston Hughes has been written about in a wide range of biographies, which are available at many libraries. What follows is a brief timeline of important dates in his life. 1902: James Langston Hughes born February 1, in Joplin, Missouri, to Carrie Langston Hughes and James Nathaniel Hughes. 1902-1914: Lived in Mexico, Missouri, and Kansas for short periods with his mother and father, then, after they separated, with his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas. 1914: Moved from Lawrence to join his mother and stepfather in Lincoln, Illinois. 1916: Elected class poet for grammar school graduation at Lincoln. Moved from Lincoln to Cleveland, Ohio. 1920: Chosen editor of Central High School Yearbook, Cleveland. Graduated from Central High School. Spent the year after graduation in Mexico with his father. 1921: Published juvenile poetry in The Brownie's Book. "A Negro Speaks of Rivers" published in The Crisis. Entered Columbia University in New York. 1922: Left Columbia to take assorted jobs in New York area. 1923-24: Employed as cook's helper on tramp steamer to Africa, Holland, and Europe. Employed as cook in Paris night club; stranded as a beachcomber in Genoa. Returned from Europe to live with his mother in Washington, D.C. 1925: Lived in Washington, D.C. Won first prize for poetry in Opportunity contest. Won second prize for essay and third prize for poetry in The Crisis contest. Carl Van Vechten introduced his poetry to Alfred Knopf. 1926: Entered Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Weary Blues published. Fire published. Won first prize in Witter Bynner Undergraduate Poetry Contest. 1927: Fine Clothes to the Jew published. Traveled in South. 1929: Graduated from Lincoln University. 1930: Not Without Laughter published. Won Harmon award for literature. 1931: Dear Lovely Death and The Negro Mother published. Traveled to Haiti and Cuba. Conducted poetry reading tour in the South and West. 1932: The Dream Keeper , Scottsboro Limited , and Popo and Fifina published. 1933: Returned to California from Russia by way of Japan. Spent year writing at Carmel by the Sea. 1934: Ways of White Folks published. Death of father in Mexico. 1935: Received Guggenheim Fellowship. Lived and worked in Mexico. 1937: Traveled to Spain as correspondent for Baltimore Afro- American . Death of mother. 1938: A New Song published. Founded Harlem Suitcase Theatre. 1939: Founded The New Negro Theater in Los Angeles. 1940: The Big Sea published. 1941: Received Rosenwald Fellowship. 1942: Shakespeare in Harlem published. Founded Skyloft P1ayers in Chicago. 1943: Freedom's Plow and Jim Crow's Last Stand published. Began Chicago Defender columns. Granted Hon. Litt. D. from Lincoln University. 1946: Elected to membership in National Institute of Arts and Letters. 1947: Fields of Wonder and translation of Jacques Roumain's Masters of the Dew published. Appointed Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Atlanta University. 1948: Translation of Nicolas Guillen's Cuba Libre published. 1949: Appointed Poet in Residence at the Laboratory School, University of Chicago. Troubled Island presented in New York. 1950: Simple Speaks His Mind and The Poetry of the Negro published. The Barrier presented in New York. 1951: Montage on a Dream Deferred and translation of Garcia Lorca's Romancero Gitano published. 1952: Laughing to Keep From Crying and First Book of Negroes published. 1953: Received Ainsfeld-Wolfe Award (Best book of year on race relations). Simple Takes a Wife published. 1954: Famous American Negroes and First Book of Rhythms published. 1955: Sweet Flypaper of Life , Famous Negro Music Makers , and First Book of Jazz published. 1956: I Wonder As I Wander , A Pictorial History of the Negro In America , and The First Book of the West Indies , published. 1957: Simple Stakes a Claim and Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral published. Simply Heavenly presented on Broadway. 1958: Famous Negro Heroes of America and The Book of Negro Folklore published. 1959: Selected Poems and Tambourines to Glory published. 1960: Received Spingarn Medal. African Treasury and The First Book of Africa published. 1961: Ask Your Mama and The Best of Simple published. Black Nativity presented in New York. 1962: Fight for Freedom published. Attended literary conference in Uganda and Nigeria. Began New York Post columns. 1963: Something in Common and Other Stories . Poems from Black Africa . Tambourines to Glory (play based on novel) presented on Broadway. Received Doctor of Letters degree from Howard University. 1964: New Negro Poets : U.S.A. edited. Jerico-Jim Crow presented in New York. Helped prepare BBC's The Negro in America series. Granted Hon. Litt. D. from Western Reserve. 1965: Simple's Uncle Sam published. The Prodigal Son presented in New York. Wrote script for WCBS-TV's Easter program. "It's a Mighty World". Lectured in America Houses in Europe for United States Information Agency. 1966: La Poesie Negro-Americaine , and The Book of Negro Humor edited. 1967: The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers , edited. The Panther and the Lash , Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment , with Milton Meltzer. Hughes died May 22, 1967. [from Donald C. Dickinson's A Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes and James A. Emanuel's Langston Hughes ]

Processing Information

This collection has undergone processing at several points over the past three decades. The processing project in 2000-2002 was intended to clarify problematic listings of materials and incorporate previously unprocessed materials, including some groups formerly classified as "printed" (such as newspaper clippings, postcards, and photographs). Due to the number of times the papers were rearranged, much of the original identification and arrangement of materials was lost, making it difficult to recreate associations (such as photographs that were once enclosed in letters to Hughes). Several of the series included in this finding aid were inherited from these earlier processing projects. Therefore, a series such as "Personal Appearances", which would have been more logically broken into individual components (writings, printed ephemera, clippings, etc.) has been kept intact. Readers should be aware, however, that many other items that document Hughes' personal appearances can, indeed, be found in other series, such as Series XVII. Printed Ephemera. Some other materials, which may have been grouped together before by subject have been placed in appropriate series, so that, for example, one may find material documenting "Tambourines to Glory" in Series II, Professional Correspondence , Series II., Writings , Series XII, Photographs , and Series XXII, Graphic Materials . Some small groups of materials, primarily letters, that were formerly included here, but which did not come from Langston Hughes' estate, have been cataloged separately. Some other materials from non-Hughes sources have been kept with the papers, since they would be extremely difficult to segregate. One other specific exception to provenance is the presence of items donated by Carl Van Vechten, since many of these were clearly intended for the Hughes papers by Hughes and arrived at Yale by way of Van Vechten.

• African American authors -- 20th Century -- Archives
• Alfred A. Knopf, Inc
• American literature -- 20th century
• Bonds, Margaret, 1913-1972
• Bontemps, Arna, 1902-1973
• Brooks, Gwendolyn, 1917-2000
• Dodson, Owen, 1914-1983
• Dramatists -- 20th Century -- Archives
• Fauset, Jessie Redmon, 1882-1961
• Frick, Dorothy Peterson, 1897-1978
• Harlem Renaissance -- Archives
• Hurston, Zora Neale, 1891-1960
• Karamu House
• Lyricists -- 20th Century -- Archives
• Meyerowitz, Jan, 1913-1998
• Photograph albums
• Photographic prints
• Poets, American -- 20th Century -- Archives
• Spingarn, Amy Einstein, 1883-1980
• Studio portraits
• Van Vechten, Carl, 1880-1964
• World Festival of Negro Arts

Finding Aid & Administrative Information

Repository details.

Part of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Repository

121 Wall Street New Haven, CT 06511

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The Beinecke Library is open to all Yale University students and faculty, and visiting researchers whose work requires use of its special collections. You will need to bring appropriate photo ID the first time you register. Beinecke is a non-circulating, closed stack library. Paging is done by library staff during business hours. You can request collection material online at least two business days in advance of your visit, using the request links in Archives at Yale. For more information, please see Planning Your Research Visit and consult the Reading Room Policies prior to visiting the library.

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Langston Hughes Papers. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Cite Item Description

Langston Hughes Papers. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/11/resources/969 Accessed July 20, 2024.

Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Langston hughes papers.

Letters, manuscripts, and photographs that document the life of the African-American poet.

The career of James Langston Hughes (1902-1967), a central figure during the Harlem Renaissance, spanned five decades. He wrote poetry, short stories, plays, newspaper columns, children’s books, and pictorial histories. He also edited several volumes of prose and fiction by African-American and African writers. Through his writing and through his extensive travels and lecture tours he came into direct contact with an amazing array of writers, artists, activists, and performers of the twentieth century. The Langston Hughes Papers span the years 1862-1980. 

History of the Collection

Gift of Langston Hughes and bequest of the estate of Langston Hughes, ca. 1940-67.

The Collection

The Langston Hughes Papers contain letters, manuscripts, personal items, photographs, clippings, artworks, and objects that document the life of the well-known African-American poet. 

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Jazz as Communication

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Langston Hughes, a central poet of the Harlem renaissance, was significantly influenced by the sounds and traditions of the blues and jazz. He presented “Jazz and Communication” at a panel led by Marshall Stearns at the Newport Casino Theater during the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival. The essay opens on a practical note, as Hughes questions those who feel that jazz can exist only outside of commercial spheres. He points out that all the great blues musicians, by performing, have been “communicating for money,” and that this in no way compromised their craft. Hughes argues that jazz is everywhere, encompassing the blues and rock and roll. To those who would deny the connections between musical traditions, Hughes states, “Jazz is a great big sea. It washes up all kinds of fish and shells and spume and waves with a steady old beat, or off-beat.” Throughout the essay, Hughes cites the singers and musicians who have influenced his writing. He also notes other authors who have been “putting jazz into words,” such as Dorothy Baker, Jean Paul Sartre, and W.C. Handy. Turning to the audience, Hughes states, “Jazz is a heartbeat—its heartbeat is yours. You will tell me about its perspectives when you get ready.”

You can start anywhere—Jazz as Communication—since it’s a circle, and you yourself are the dot in the middle. You, me. For example, I’ll start with the Blues. I’m not a Southerner. I never worked on a levee. I hardly ever saw a cotton field except from the highway. But women behave the same on Park Avenue as they do on a levee: when you’ve got hold of one part of them the other part escapes you. That’s the Blues!

Life is as hard on Broadway as it is in Blues-originating-land. The Brill Building Blues is just as hungry as the Mississippi Levee Blues. One communicates to the other, brother! Somebody is going to rise up and tell me that nothing that comes out of Tin Pan Alley is jazz. I disagree. Commercial, yes. But so was Storeyville, so was Basin Street. What do you think Tony Jackson and Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver and Louis Armstrong were playing for?(1) Peanuts? No, money, even in Dixieland. They were communicating for money. For fun, too—because they had fun. But the money helped the fun along.

Now; To skip a half century, somebody is going to rise up and tell me Rock and Roll isn’t jazz. First, two or three years ago, there were all these songs about too young to know —but . . . . The songs are right. You’re never too young to know how bad it is to love and not have love come back to you. That’s as basic as the Blues. And that’s what Rock and Roll is—teenage Heartbreak Hotel —the old songs reduced to the lowest common denominator. The music goes way back to Blind Lemon and Leadbelly—Georgia Tom merging into the Gospel Songs—­Ma Rainey, and the most primitive of the Blues.(2) It borrows their gut-bucket heartache. It goes back to the jubilees and stepped-up Spiri­tuals—Sister Tharpe—and borrows their I’m-gonna-be-happy-anyhow-in-spite-of-this-world kind of hope. It goes back further and borrows the steady beat of the drums of Congo Square—that going-on beat­—and the Marching Bands’ loud and blatant yes!! Rock and Roll puts them all together and makes a music so basic it’s like the meat cleaver the butcher uses—before the cook uses the knife—before you use the sterling silver at the table on the meat that by then has been rolled up into a commercial filet mignon.

A few more years and Rock and Roll will no doubt be washed back half forgotten into the sea of jazz. Jazz is a great big sea. It washes up all kinds of fish and shells and spume and waves with a steady old beat, or off-beat. And Louis must be getting old if he thinks J. J. and Kai—and even Elvis—didn’t come out of the same sea he came out of, too. Some water has chlorine in it and some doesn’t. There’re all kinds of water. There’s salt water and Saratoga water and Vichy water, Quinine water and Pluto water—and Newport rain. And it’s all water. Throw it all in the sea, and the sea’ll keep on rolling along toward shore and crashing and booming back into itself again. The sun pulls the moon. The moon pulls the sea. They also pull jazz and me. Beyond Kai to Count to Lonnie to Texas Red, beyond June to Sarah to Billy to Bessie to Ma Rainey. And the Most is the It—the all of it.(3)

Jazz seeps into words—spelled out words. Nelson Algren is influenced by jazz. Ralph Ellison is, too. Sartre, too. Jacques Prévert. Most of the best writers today are. Look at the end of the Ballad of the Sad Cafe. Me as the public, my dot in the middle—it was fifty years ago, the first time I heard the Blues on Independence Avenue in Kansas City. Then State Street in Chicago. Then Harlem in the twenties with J. P. and J. C. Johnson and Fats and Willie the Lion and Nappy playing piano—with the Blues running all up and down the keyboard through the ragtime and the jazz.(4) House rent party cards. I wrote The Weary Blues:

Downing a drowsy syncopated tune . . . . . . etc. . . . .

Shuffle Along was running then—the Sissle and Blake tunes. A little later Runnin’ Wild and the Charleston and Fletcher and Duke and Cab. Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, and Ella. Tiny Parham in Chicago. And at the end of the Depression times, what I heard at Minton’s. A young music—coming out of young people. Billy—the male and female of them—both the Eckstein and the Holiday—and Dizzy and Tad and the Monk.(5) Some of it came out in poems of mine in Montage of a Dream Deferred later. Jazz again putting itself into words.

But I wasn’t the only one putting jazz into words. Better poets of the heart of jazz beat me to it. W. C. Handy a long time before. Benton Overstreet. Mule Bradford. Then Buddy DeSilva on the pop level. Ira Gershwin. By and by Dorothy Baker in the novel—to name only the most obvious—the ones with labels. I mean the ones you can spell out easy with a-b-c’s—the word mongers—outside the music. But always the ones of the music were the best—Charlie Christian, for example, Bix, Louis, Joe Sullivan, Count.(6)

Now, to wind it all up, with you in the middle—jazz is only what you yourself get out of it. Louis’s famous quote—or misquote probably­—“Lady, if you have to ask what it is, you’ll never know.” Well, I wouldn’t be so positive. The lady just might know—without being able to let loose the cry—to follow through—to light up before the fuse blows out. To me jazz is a montage of a dream deferred. A great big dream—yet to come—and always yet— to become ultimately and finally true. Maybe in the next seminar—for Saturday—Nat Hentoff and Billy Strayhorn and Tony Scott and the others on that panel will tell us about it—when they take up “The Future of Jazz.” The Bird was looking for that future like mad. The Newborns, Chico, Dave, Gulda, Milt, Charlie Mingus.(7) That future is what you call pregnant. Potential papas and mamas of tomor­row’s jazz are all known. But THE papa and THE mama—maybe both—are anonymous. But the child will communicate. Jazz is a heartbeat—­its heartbeat is yours. You will tell me about its perspectives when you get ready.

(1) Tony Jackson (1876-1921), American ragtime pianist and blues singer; Ferdinand Joseph “Jelly Roll” Morton (1885-1941) began playing piano in New Orleans’ Storyville at the age of seventeen and was regarded by many as the first great jazz composer; Joseph “King” Oliver (1885-1938), popular ragtime performer with roots in New Orleans.

(2) Blind Lemon Jefferson (1897-1929), early American pioneer of the blues; Thomas “Georgia Tom” Dorsey (1899-1993), African American blues singer, gospel songwriter, and pianist.

(3) James Louis “J. J.” Johnson (1924- ), an American trombonist and composer, and Kai Winding (1922-1983), a Danish American trombonist, formed the popular group Jay and Kai in 1954; Lonnie Johnson (1889-1970), American guitarist and jazz singer.

(4) Jacques Prévert (1900-1977), French poet; James Price “J. P.” Johnson (1894-1955), American ragtime and blues pianist and composer; J. C. Johnson (1896-1981), jazz pianist and songwriter; Willie Hilton Napoleon “Nappy” Lamare (1907-1988), American guitarist, banjoist, composer, and singer.

(5) Chick Webb (1909-1939), American drummer and bandleader; Hartzell Strathdene “Tiny” Parham (1900-1943), Canadian American pianist, organist, and bandleader; John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie (1917-1993), American trumpeter and bandleader; Thelonius Monk (1917-1982), American jazz pianist and composer.

(6) W. Benton Overstreet, American songwriter; Perry “Mule” Bradford (1893-1970), American pianist, songwriter, singer, and producer; Buddy DeSilva, American songwriter; Dorothy Baker (1907-1968), jazz writer best known for Young Man with a Horn , a novel about the life of Leon “Bix” Deiderbecke; Charlie Christian (1916-1942), American guitarist; Joe Sullivan (1906-1971), American pianist and composer.

(7) Nathan Irving “Nat” Hentoff (1925-), American writer and jazz historian; Billy Strayhorn (1915-1967), American composer, arranger, and pianist; Tony Scott (1921-), American clarinetist and saxophonist; Charlie “Bird” Parker (1920-1955), American alto saxophonist and one of the most influential soloists in jazz; Friedrich Gulda (1930-), Austrian pianist, flutist, baritone saxophonist, singer, and composer; Charles Mingus (1922-1979), American double bass player, pianist, composer, and bandleader.

Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. He sought to honestly portray the...

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Essay on Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes Langston Hughes was one of the first black men to express the spirit of blues and jazz into words. An African American Hughes became a well known poet, novelist, journalist, and playwright. Because his father emigrated to Mexico and his mother was often away, Hughes was brought up in Lawrence, Kansas, by his grandmother Mary Langston. Her second husband (Hughes's grandfather) was a fierce abolitionist. She helped Hughes to see the cause of social justice. As a lonely child Hughes turned to reading and writing, publishing his first poems while in high school in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1921 he entered Columbia University, but left after an unhappy year. Even as he worked as a delivery man, a messmate on …show more content…

Hughes bought a house in Harlem, where he spent the rest of his life. Hughes still feared for the future of urban blacks. His point of view became immense and included another book of poetry , almost a dozen children's books, several opera libretti, four books translated from French and Spanish, two collections of stories, another novel, a history of the NAACP and another volume of autobiography, I Wonder As I Wander (1956). He also continued his work in the theater, pioneering in the gospel musical play. Blues began in the south and slowly made its way into the great cities of the North. As the great migration began people took what they knew in south to the north. This included music. Langston Hughes living in Harlem was caught up in the new rhythm of music and based many of his poems on it. As a boy he remembers hearing the blues perfomed in Kansas City. "Hughes was fascinated with black music, tried his hand at writing lyrics, and was taken with the possibilities of performing music and poetry together" 4 "Besides having both a love of this music and the common black folk it was created by and for, one of the reasons that Hughes began to draw on the blues tradition for writing his poetry is that he hoped to capitalize on the blues craze." 5Though the markets for music and poetry were quite different, he thought he could

Stereotypes Of African Americans In The Poetry Of Langston Hughes

While Hughes attended grammar school in Lincoln, he was elected class poet. Pretty impressive at as Black Student to be recognized with something like that. Hughes stated that in retrospect he thought it was because of the stereotype that African Americans have rhythm. What some didn't know is that Hughes was a victim of stereotype. In his English teacher class Hughes and another nergo were the only two in the classroom, plus the teacher always pointed out how rhythm is important in their culture. So since Hughes knew that all negro had rhythm that's why the whole class elected him poet. But if think about it. That moment in class lead him to man he is today written poems to view what African American went through in those

Langston Hughes's Blues At Dawn

When Langston Hughes was writing his poems, he wanted the reader to get a dive into the life of the black Americans during the Harlem Renaissance. In most of his work, Langston writes about the truth and their actual culture such as, both, their love for music and suffering during this time. In Blues

Biography of Langston Hughes Essay

• 6 Works Cited

The well known poet Langston Hughes was an inspiring character during the Harlem Renaissance to provide a push for the black communities to fight for the rights they deserved. Hughes wrote his poetry to deliver important messages and provide support to the movements. When he was at a young age a teacher introduced him to poets Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman, and they inspired him to start his own. Being a “darker brother,” as he called blacks, he experienced and wanted his rights, and that inspired him. Although literary critics felt that Langston Hughes portrayed an unattractive view of black life, the poems demonstrate reality. Hughes used the Blues and Jazz to add effect to his work as well as his extravagant word use and literary

Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance Essay

Hughes was a great writer with much diversity in his types of writings. His poetry was a way for us to see a picture of urban life during the Harlem Renaissance, the habits, attitudes, and feelings of his oppressed people. These poems did more than reveal the pain of poverty, it also illustrated racial pride and dignity. “His main concern was the uplift of his people, whose strengths, resiliency, courage, and humor he wanted to record as part of the general American experience” (Wikipedia, Langston Hughes). Hughes was not ashamed of his heritage and his main theme, “black is beautiful,” was expressed and shared to the world through his poetry. During the literary movement, music was central to the cultural movement of the Harlem Renaissance, which was a main feature of Hughes’s poetry. He had an important technical influence by his emphasis on folk, jazz, and blues rhythms as the basis of his poetry of racial pride. Hughes used this unique style of writing because it was important to him to have the readers feel and experience what they were reading, “to recognize the covert rhetoric in lyric means to appreciate the overlap between emotive and discursive poetry. Rooted in song, the lyric reestablishes the ritual of human communion” (Miller 52).

Essay on Langston Hughes? Influence on American Literature

• 4 Works Cited

Langston Hughes was one of the great writers of his time. He was named the “most renowned African American poet of the 20th century” (McLaren). Through his writing he made many contributions to following generations by writing about African American issues in creative ways including the use of blues and jazz. Langston Hughes captured the scene of Harlem life in the early 20th century significantly influencing American Literature. He once explained that his writing was an attempt to “explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America” (Daniel 760). To fulfill this task, he wrote 15 volumes of poetry, six novels, three books, 11 plays, and a variety of non-fiction work (Daniel 760). He also edited over 50 books in his time (McKay).

Annotated Bibliography: The Beatles Cultural Influences

“Langston Hughes: Beyond The Music and The Rhythm of An Extraordinary Black Artist.” JazzMuzic 23 (2001): 35-39.

Langston Hughes Biography Essay

Shortly after his arrival in the City, Hughes sought a position as a page at the Library of Congress, but Washington’s black leaders were unsuccessful in landing him this choice position. Hughes accepted an advertising job at the black weekly, the Washington Sentinel, but quit the paper shortly after because of poor pay. He then took a job at a laundromat. During his leisure hours, he spent time on 7th Street, NW where ordinary black people lived. Along the storefronts, he observed them eating barbecue and fish sandwiches. Seventh Street residents were poor but cherished life. They shot pool and told many tall tales. Here, Hughes saw something else of interest. People sang and played the blues. Although the songs were happy or

Langston Hughes Research Paper

James Langston Hughes, Joplin, 1902 - New York, 1967 an American writer. He was one of the greatest exponents of the Renaissance Harlem in the twenties and later, the chief representative of the Afro-American culture, which took him not only one of his most brilliant poets but a tireless protagonist and promoter . Through his writings and public appearances he had as main objective the social and civil progress of the black population of the United States. He spent his childhood in Kansas with his maternal grandmother. He lived for a short time with his father in Mexico, but left him because of this disregard for his own race. He traveled by sea and played junior in France and Italy work before making its appearance on the literary scene in Harlem, where he published between 1921 and 1925, in the

How Did Langston Hughes Move To The Harlem Renaissance

He was born in Joplin, Missouri. When Hughes was young, his parents split leaving him to be raised primarily by his grandmother and his mom. He began writing poetry in Cleveland, Ohio when he moved there with his mother. In 1921, Hughes enrolled at Columbia University but dropped out after a year. He worked as a steward and traveled throughout Africa and Europe before returning to the United States in 1924. In 1925, Hughes won first in the Opportunity magazine competition. He also received a scholarship to go to Lincoln University. While Hughes was attending Lincoln University, he was able to publish his first book of poetry called The Weary Blues. Knopf published his book in 1926. Langston Hughes published his first novel titled Not Without Laughter after he graduated from Lincoln University. Throughout the 1930s, he traveled around the nation and gave lectures. During this time he continued to write poetry and short stories. In 1934, Hughes published a series of short stories titled The Ways of White Folks. The Big Sea was published in 1940. This was an autobiography of Langston Hughes. In the 1940’s, Hughes helped with lyrics for the Street Scene musical on Broadway. With the money he made from this musical, he bought a house in Harlem. Hughes published one of his most famous works in 1951 titled “Harlem, (What happens to a dream

Langston Hughes Influence On Society

Hughes has complex ancestry. Both of Hughes' paternal great-grandmothers were enslaved African Americans and both of his paternal great-grandfathers were white slave owners in Kentucky. According to Hughes, one of these men was Sam Clay, a Scottish-American whiskey

What Is Langston Hughes's Legacy

Langston Hughes was an extraordinary African-American poet, author, and playwright whose revolutionary writing style fueled the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights movement. Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri and began publishing poetry in 1921. He attended Columbia University for a year, traveled to Mexico, Africa, and Spain, and completed his education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. His work included many poems, books, and plays and a popular column for the Chicago Defender. He died on May 22, 1967, but he left behind an unforgettable legacy.

Essay on Langston Hughes' The Weary Blues

     The Blues musical move was prominent during the 1920s and '30s, a time known as the Harlem Renaissance. Blues music characteristically told the story of

Langston Hughes and Religion Essay

• 5 Works Cited

James Emanuel describes how Hughes brought attention to the importance of religion in Black history when he writes, “Religion, because of its historical importance during and after slavery, is an undeniably useful theme. . . . [Hughes, a] writer whose special province for almost forty-five years was more recent Black experience, the theme is doubly vital” (Emanual 914). I agree with James Emanuel. Hughes could

Langston Hughes: Granddaddy Of The Harlem Renaissance

Langston Hughes is an American poet known as the “Granddaddy” of the Harlem Renaissance literature. He moved around a lot with his mother until they finally settled in Cleveland, Ohio. During this time, he was introduced to poets Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman. In 1925 while working in Washington D.C. he met Vachel Lindsay who helped him promote his poetry.

Langston Hughes, An American Poet Essay

• 3 Works Cited

Hughes early inspiration for writing came from the loneliness of his childhood. He did not have a stable family life as a child. Once his parents divorced and he went to live with his grandmother, he was very lonesome and unhappy. His grandmother was about 70 years old when Langston first went to live with her. While living with her he lived a sheltered life. Once his grandmother died, he went to live with James and Mary

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Black History Month Poetry Project: Langston Hughes

Alicia Lewis Miss Emily Brown Period: 1 3/2/22 Black History Month Poetry Project Langston Hughes is an African American poet who wrote from 1921, until he passed away in 1967. Hughes' poetry mainly focused on the black experience in America. In his time, his work was not nearly as appreciated as it is now. Many black artists criticized Hughes for portraying what was thought to be an unattractive portrayal of the black life. Throughout all of Hughes' criticism, however, he continued to record the hardships and unfairness of black life and it’s frustration. Langston Hughes was the first black American to earn his living solely from his writing and public lectures. It was also widely believed that Langston Hughes was homosexual, which may not …show more content…

The poem, “I too” speaks about the racial segregation African Americans faced in the early-middle 1900s, and sometimes still to this day. The poem very obviously references the idea that African Americans are less than, or not even actual Americans. “I too” portrays the life of an African American during the time of racial segregation, coming from someone who experienced it. An African American. In the poem, the speaker says “I am the darker brother/They send me to eat in the kitchen/When company comes” (Hughes 1-3). This is an allusion to the racial segregation that black Americans face. The poem “Let America be America Again” highlights the contrast between the “American Dream” and the reality of living in America for many individuals. The speaker then begins to argue that this idea of America has never existed for many people, especially African Americans, by saying “America was never America to me” (Hughes 5). The poem goes on to list many counterexamples of the American dream other than African Americans; the working poor class, immigrants, and the Native Americans being forcefully removed from their

More about Black History Month Poetry Project: Langston Hughes

What do you already know about Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance?

Related questions.

based on the topic choice of teacher pay which thesis would be the strongest? I think teachers are hard workers teachers have the important job of Education our children and should be paid higher wages to reflect the importance of this task this paper will explore reasons why teachers across the country should we pay higher wages teachers make less money than most people think ​

Explanation:

I think you are intended to pick B, but I think D is an answer most teachers would agree with. A wage paid the average teacher does not permit the spouse to stay at home to raise children.

C is OK but it is very stilted.

A leads you nowhere.

At the chapter’s end, the Master remains to build a new Laketown dies is going to the Lonely Mountain

Hello, I have an oral presentation for English next week and I have to write a poem on self confidence. If anyone is good at writing poems and is willing to help me write mine please add cookiegurl014.​

When I was down and out of luck

When dark the path, my life had took

When I was at my lowest low

A rope, a helping hand did throw

And pulled me up, out of the pit

And in the dark, a candle lit

And for my hunger gave me "Bread"

Then quenched a thirst inside my head

This loving servant helped me see

There's so much more to this, than me

By helping me, she showed me love

And led me to the One above

And now, alone, as I reflect

I find a spot of self-respect

That had been drowning in my tears

And had not shown itself in years

Let me through life, now walk, not run

Because the help of this true one

Did set me straight and on my way

And I'll remember day to day

I found this one hope it helps :)

HELP ME OUT PLEASE!!!!!!!!! Written Response (Project): Collaborative(Group) Discussion Topic: Do you prefer to read Chief Joseph’s speech “An Indian’s View of Indian Affairs” or do you prefer to read Satana’s speech “My Heart is Bursting”? Answer these questions: Why do you prefer that speech over the other one? What do you like about that speech? What is something that both Chief Joseph and Satana have in common? What is something different about Chief Joseph and Satana? When were they born and what did they do for a living? Give an honest opinion on the topic

Explanation

Satana’s speech “My Heart is Bursting

because it says my heart is bursting

it is about love

they both chief the love

they don't love them self

they love the speech

The following sentence is punctuated correctly. Waiting for the waitress to take his order Jimmy hungrily studied the menu. True False

the correct sentence would say "Waiting for the waitress to take his order, Jimmy hungrily studied the menu.

It's also when you eat and how much you eat. And while we can all sympathize with the need to have things fast and easy in our busy lives, nutritionists say eating well is actually not that hard. It just takes planning and, some would say, a little help from the village. —“Healthy Eating: Small Changes Can Equal Big Results,” Jenny Staletovich Which counterclaim is the author acknowledging in this passage? A. It is easier to eat a healthy diet. B. It is often hard to eat a healthy diet. C. Parents need help with creating a healthy diet. D. Parents are not sure what to feed their children HELP PLEASE

B would B the correct answer, have a nice day and B careful

Because, really, what a choice there was; what a prodigy of things to be afraid of! The moment that you understood this, really understood it, you lost your anxiety instantly. Anxiety was a luxury, a joke you had no room for once you knew the variety of deaths and mutilations the war offered. The purpose of the paradox in the excerpt is to illustrate the narrator’s desire to relieve his uneasiness. reinforce the physical and emotional challenges of war. show that indulgences are stolen during war, not provided. highlight the idea that fear can be viewed in different ways.

D. highlight the idea that fear can be viewed in different ways.

The purpose of the paradox in the excerpt is to highlight the idea that fear can be viewed in different ways. (option D)

A paradox is a statement that may seem to be contradictory or illogical but that can be true. In the excerpt, the paradox lies in the fact that the speaker says " anxiety was a luxury ."

We all know anxiety is a most annoying feeling. So it seems contradictory that someone would call it a luxury . The author's purpose when doing so is to highlight the different ways to view fear .

He reveals that anxiety was lost once people heard about the terrible deaths and mutilations . So anxiety was indeed a luxury belonging to those who were ignorant of such atrocities.

With the information above in mind, we can choose option D as the best answer.

Learn more about paradox here:

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Identify each cause of the French revolution as economic, political, or intellectual. lack of representation of the third estate in the Estates-General the success of the American Revolution the French government’s aid to the Americans during the American Revolution economic arrowRight political arrowRight intellectual arrowRight

where is the question?

Econmice = The french government's aid to the American's during the American Revolution.

Poltical = Lack of representation of the third estate in Estate-General

Intelluctual = The success of the American Revolution

Read the passage about the life of Clara Barton. Clara Barton was born on December 25, 1821, in Oxford, Massachusetts. As a child, Clara was very shy. She first found her calling while caring for her brother after he fell from a rafter in their barn. Despite the fact that most teachers were still men at the time, Clara became a teacher at the age of 15, as well as one of the first women to work for the federal government at the US Patent Office. In 1881, Clara opened the first chapter of the American Red Cross in the United States and served as its first president. The American Red Cross is a relief organization that offers assistance to victims of such disasters as the 1889 Johnstown Flood and the 1900 Galveston Flood. She served as president for 23 years before resigning amidst claims that money was being mishandled internally. The Civil War was a bloody war fought between the years 1861–1865. During the war, Clara sought to help the soldiers in any way she could. She collected needed supplies and distributed them to the Union Army. These supplies included items such as food, bedding, and clothing. However, Clara was not content to sit on the sidelines; she often risked her own life to care for soldiers wounded in battle. For these deeds, she was nicknamed the "Angel of the Battlefield.” When the war ended in 1865, Clara worked for the War Department helping in various ways. Which sentence from the passage contains information that could best be used to create a yearbook page about Clara Barton? A: “The American Red Cross is a relief organization that offers assistance to victims of such disasters as the 1889 Johnstown Flood and the 1900 Galveston Flood.” B: “She served as president for 23 years before resigning amidst claims that money was being mishandled internally.” C: “The Civil War was a bloody war fought between the years 1861–1865.” D: “However, Clara was not content to sit on the sidelines; she often risked her own life to care for soldiers wounded in battle.”

Yearbook as the name implies is a book published once in a year , it consists of all achievement made that year.

Therefore, “She served as president for 23 years before resigning amidst claims that money was being mishandled internally.” could best be used to create a yearbook page about Clara Barton .

https://brainly.com/question/15789172

Paris vs. John Proctor?

Answer: The conflict between John Proctor and Reverend Paris in The Crucible is that Proctor believes Paris is greedy, disregards God, and abuses his authority. Likewise, Paris believes that a group in Salem is attempting to usurp his power and that Proctor is part of that group.

Suppose your teacher asks you to create a poster that presents a character vs. nature conflict. Write a paragraph about your poster. Include in your response a description of the protagonist, a description of the antagonist, an explanation of the conflict, and a description of the images that would appear on the poster.

A conflict is a literary element that is present in all stories. This refers to a struggle between two opposing forces. These two forces are the antagonist and the protagonist. Moreover, the conflict can be internal (within the protagonist) or external (between two people or between a person and an external force). The conflict is what drives a story and adds tension to it.

In the story behind Barz vets with PTSD basin new Warzone with little support how did David Carlson time at war change him

Carlson stated, "Prison and war take the same survival skills," in other words, his experiences as a war veteran affected his view of the correctional facility, one that needed actions he termed as "survival skills".

Referring to the change in perception resulting from his time at war, he further stated, "...I came up with all sorts of philosophies in my mind the same way I had in Iraq. We were always hypervigilant..., but in my mind, I was in combat with the jail." He's suffering from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) made him a difficult inmate because he still felt he was at war and he got little professional medical therapy.

Which sentence has a direct object? ( 19) We had few destinations in mind, but we asked friends and family for advice about places to go and new things to do. Sentence 3. Today people are so driven to work hard, make money and be successful. (18) First we, researched A. Sentence 19 B. sentence 3 C. sentence 9 got that wrong D. sentence 18

Sentence 19

A direct object is the one receiving the action of the verb. In the sentence, the 'friends and family' were the one being asked by the 'we' so I think that's the answer.

Select the correct text in the passage. Read this excerpt from Alice Gerstenberg's Alice in Wonderland. Which line of dialogue shows that Humpty Dumpty is proud of his appearance? ALICE: My name is Alice, but- HUMPTY DUMPTY: It's a stupid name enough, what does it mean? ALICE: Must a name mean something? HUMPTY DUMPTY: Of course it must, my name means the shape I am-and a good, handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost. ALICE: You're Humpty Dumpty! Just like an egg. HUMPTY DUMPTY: It's very provoking, to be called an egg-very. ALICE: I said you looked like an egg, Sir, and some eggs are very pretty, you know. HUMPTY DUMPTY: Some people have no more sense than a baby. ALICE: Why do you sit here all alone? HUMPTY DUMPTY: Why, because there's nobody with me. Did you think I didn't know the answer to that? Ask another. ALICE: Don't you think you'd be safer down on the ground? That wall's so very narrow. HUMPTY DUMPTY: What tremendously easy riddles you ask! Of course I don't think so. Take a good look at mel I'm one that has spoken to a king, I am, to show you I'm not proud, you may shake hands with me! plz help me soon!!!​

The line " Of course it must, my name means the shape I am-and a good, handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost " shows Humpty Dumpty is proud of his appearance.

In his other lines of dialogue, Humpty is clearly arrogant and proud, but this line specifically shows that he is proud of his shape and looks.

Read the excerpt from Warriors Don't Cry. "Then you don't have anything to be concerned about." Mother Lois maneuvered through the unusually heavy traffic. "I don't know where all the cars could have come from," she said. We both craned our necks, curious about all the unfamiliar cars and people. Certainly there had never before been so many white people driving down the streets of our quiet, tree-lined neighborhood. What idea is emphasized through repetition? Commuter traffic is a daily inconvenience. The streets are unusually crowded. The narrator is looking for her friends. Mother Lois is not a skilled driver.

B. The streets are usually crowded

Explanation: EDGE 2020

9. Which choice best describes the impact of Miki's visions of his past? They give the reader a clear picture of Miki's puppyhood. H. Up was They help the reader understand why Miki is drawn to the pack. a at L- and They emphasize how much Miki misses his mother and father. ut They reinforce the idea that Miki is overwhelmed by the wolves. ests na CLEAR ALL ife,

Explanation: it makes sense, D is another possibility if B is wrong

1 20. What does hypocritical mean in this passage: "I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die!" attentive confused sensitive deceptive

Since the word hypocritical means acting one way when you mean another, deceptive works in this sentence, since deceptive means something looks one way when it is actually not that way.

An example of hypocrisy is saying bullying is bad and then bullying someone yourself. That's acting one way when you mean another, going back on your word and being deceptive, because everyone thinks you're nice but in fact you are not.

Hopefully that helps :)

Choose the correct punctuation. Have you read the short story "My Sixth Grade Summer The actor said, "I never wanted to be so famous "I can't believe it I shouted.

Have you read the short story "My Sixth Grade Summer

The actor said, "I never wanted to be so famous

"I can't believe it

After choosing the correct symbols, the punctuation errors in the given sentences can be rectified as below,

Punctuation errors can be referred to or considered as the errors that occur within a literary composition due to an inappropriate use of punctuation marks and symbols within the sentences. They may also occur when the appropriate symbols are not used in the sentences .

When the use of appropriate punctuation marks are used in the sentences given above, they become grammatically correct , and also become meaningful as well as complete within their composition .

Therefore, the significance regarding punctuation errors has been aforementioned.

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How does the photograph enhance the information in the passage? A. The picture emphasizes the intention of the photographer to tell the world about the miseries faced by migrants. B. The picture highlights the photographer's skills in capturing the perfect emotion on the woman's face. C. The picture shows the inability of the farmhands to find steady employment. D. The picture supports the aim of the photographer to capture vivid emotions of women. E. The picture is part of a collaborative effort to raise funds for women, as mentioned in the text.

A. The picture emphasizes the intention of the photographer to tell the world about the miseries faced by migrants.

Yeah, I would say A too

Write a speech on about your plans for future

A high school dropout is what I shall become. I will become a shoplifter so i can afford basic needs. By the time I turn 17 I will be caught and thrown into jail. After I get realeased, Ill join the Crips and then get arrested again c;

Why do you think Soda tells Pony to go back to sleep so firmly?

Answer:cuz he sucks

Correct this run-on sentence. Would mean a lot. You can make it two sentences or use a comma and a coordinating conjunction. The farm is in Pennsylvania it is near the city of Gettysburg.

The farm is in Pennsylvania, it's near the city of Gettysburg.

based on the details in this excerpt, what conclusion can be drawn about pharos in ancient Egypt

I think the answer is b

PLS HELP!! Every minute lasted an hour as I sat next to my patient and watched him struggle for air. –"Rain Forest Doctor" What is the meaning of the hyperbole? Time moved slowly because they were worried and in a hurry. Time moved quickly because the helicopter was fast. It took them over an hour to get to the hospital. It took them only a couple of minutes to reach the hospital.

I think it means that the author uses specific words and phrases that exaggerate and overemphasize the basic crux of the statement in order to produce a grander , more noticeable effect . The purpose of hyperbole is to create a larger-than-life effect and overly stress a specific point.

Literal language

Answer choice D

HELP PLEASE! Match each type of figurative language to its CORRECT definition! Match each term to the right definition!!!! Metaphor Personification Allusion Rhetorical question Paradox A) A reference in a literary work to a person, place, or thing in history or another work of literature B) An inquiry used for effect rather than an actual answer C) A figure of speech in which nonliving or nonhuman things are given human characteristics or abilities D) A statement that appears to contradict itself but can be true E) A comparison of two unlike things that does not use comparison words; one thing directly represents another

Allusion implies referring to something, personification is giving human abilities to animals/objects, and paradox implies a contradiction.

Use of non-literal language to make a comparison between two things (option e). For example: "She was his sunshine".

This occurs when human qualities are given to a non-human entity (option c) as in "the dog laugh".

This refers to making a reference to a person, text, etc. (option a) as in "They were as smart as the Greek philosophers".

A question that aims at making the audience deeply think about a topic but that is not meant to be answered (option b)

The use of contradictory language (option d) as in "the beginning of the end".

Learn more about figurative language in: https://brainly.com/question/2569664

pleasse please help me

Reread Paragraph 4 of "I Have a Dream" on page 48 of our eBook.

What is the question?

What is the meaning of this quote “women have always been courageous... They are always farless when protecting their children and in rge last century they have been fearless in the fight for their rights.”

2. Put the verb in brackets into the correct Present Simple form. Example: I play (play) football with my friends on Sundays. a. Tamara walks (walk) to school every day. b. We usually goes (go) to bed at around 12 am. c. I doesn´t live (not live) in Germany. 2 d. Do you listen (listen) to Queen? e. Felipe (study) Science. f. Franco ________ (not do) his homework in the morning. g. _________ Daiana _________ (go) to work by car? h. I _______ (do) yoga three times a week.

2a. has walked

b. have gone

c. haven't lived

d. have listened

e. have studied.

f. hasn't done

g. has gone

h. have done

hope that helps <3 I'm pretty good at english

essay on the day i woke up late​

brainilist plsss

by Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes's "Salvation" is a brief and powerful piece, an extract from a larger work but fully complete in itself. Alone, it is something between a short story and an autobiographical essay. As is immediately discernible from the title, the story deals with faith—specifically a child's understanding of faith. Of course, in the case of Hughes, his epiphany at the church is the opposite of the one his Aunt Reed was hoping for: instead of achieving the salvation promised by the ironic title, the young Hughes instead arrives at a new state of understanding that crushes his earlier naive beliefs about Jesus and faith. In "Salvation," a child loses some of his innocence and, at the same time, loses faith in church, a cornerstone of life for many in his community.

There is an interesting duality in Hughes's narration. At times, we as readers are exposed only to the simple childish understanding of the situation experienced by the twelve-year-old Langston, who is waiting eagerly to "see Jesus" in a literal sense. Alongside him, we experience the building anticipation as the songs and prayers in the church build to a crescendo. Ultimately, however, the crescendo never comes—an eventuality the older Hughes, who functions as narrator, has prepared the reader for from the opening lines:

I was saved from sin when I was going on thirteen. But not really saved.

Readers are invited to view the scene in the church through the eyes of the hopeful child Hughes, but at the same time, we are distanced from it, offered a foreknowledge which was not available to Langston at the age of twelve. Hughes's narration thus cushions the blow for the reader, just as the child Hughes does for his Auntie Reed in concealing the true nature of his distress from her. 

Though he is surrounded by others, Hughes is depicted as a solitary figure. Certainly, Hughes does not identify himself with the other boy, Westley, who is left sitting with him on the mourners' bench after everybody else has gone. It is implied that Westley is less well-intentioned and well-behaved than Hughes is; he blasphemes in church ("God damn!") and the comical honesty with which he expresses that he has grown tired of this endeavor is contrasted against Hughes’s sincere desire to experience salvation. Westley's irreverence is ultimately what sparks Hughes's realization about faith. After all, Westley has blasphemed in church and has gone to join the group of the saved under false pretenses—but no one seems to be the wiser. After Westley leaves, the full force of the congregation's attention now directly solely at Hughes. As his aunt cries and the preacher asks him to come to God, Hughes remains torn, unsure whether they expect him to behave authentically or not. The significance of Hughes’s isolation in this moment becomes clear at the end of the story, when he reflects that not even Jesus was there to help him through this conflict, a realization that causes him to lose faith.

This story can be read as a critique of organized religion’s emphasis on appearance and ritual—an emphasis that leaves twelve-year-old Hughes disillusioned with faith altogether. The theme of performance is first introduced through the preacher’s passionate sermon and is bolstered by the swelling songs and emotional pleas of the congregation, who descend upon the children still waiting to be saved. Hughes admires the craft of the “wonderful” performance, but its negligible impact on the children highlights its superficiality: "most of us just sat there."

The adults in the room urge the children to join them in faith, but in reality, they...

(This entire section contains 715 words.)

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are inviting the children to join them in a performance of faith. Hughes, still waiting to experience genuine salvation, does not understand this distinction and is therefore confused by the celebration and approval with which Westley’s disingenuous salvation is met. Though Hughes eventually caves to social pressure and goes through the motions of being saved, he is devastated to realize that no one seems to notice or care whether or not his salvation is authentic. This experience leaves Hughes shaken, opening his eyes to the superficiality of a ritual he once thought sacred and forcing him to become a participant in that deception himself. 

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The Poets Have Taken Governors Island. (Don’t Worry, They Gave It Back.)

Thousands of poetry fans and practitioners took the ferry out over the weekend to absorb one another’s work at the annual New York City Poetry Festival.

By Nadav Gavrielov

Photographs by Graham Dickie

Aspiring poets working up the courage to try an open mic. A couple on a surprise date. At least one veteran of verse looking for inspiration to help get through a dry spell. And far more than one person selling poetry collections.

A tranquil green expanse on Governors Island enveloped by yellow 19th-century houses was transformed into a scene of creative exchange last weekend as poets and poetry lovers descended on Nolan Park for the 13th annual New York City Poetry Festival, hosted by the nonprofit Poetry Society of New York.

Professional poets, first-time poets and many falling somewhere in between gathered at the two-day festival to take in one another’s verse in the sweltering, leafy outdoors.

Lyrics and impassioned rhymes echoed from the festival’s various stages across the lawn as poets — some whispering and subdued, others roaring their words across the park — shared their art with the city.

“It is for everyone, no matter if you started writing poetry 10 minutes ago or 10 years ago,” said Tova Greene, the festival’s organizer, adding that it was meant to be “a space for people to have that ‘aha, eureka!’ moment of ‘poetry is not dead, it’s here, it’s alive, it’s everywhere.’”

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