Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. Academy of American Poets. American Poets Magazine. Poets Search more than 3, biographies of contemporary and classic poets. Langston Hughes — Related Poets. Countee Cullen. Alice Dunbar-Nelson. James Weldon Johnson. Arna Bontemps. Sterling A. Leslie Pinckney Hill. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.
His poetry and fiction portrayed the lives of the working-class blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African-American identity and its diverse culture. Hughes stressed a racial consciousness and cultural nationalism devoid of self-hate.
His thought united people of African descent and Africa across the globe to encourage pride in their diverse black folk culture and black aesthetic. Hughes was one of the few prominent black writers to champion racial consciousness as a source of inspiration for black artists.
Hughes spent the year after high school in Mexico with his father, who tried to discourage him from writing. But Hughes's poetry and prose writings were beginning to appear in the Brownie's Book, a publication for children edited by W. Du Bois — , and he was starting work on more ambitious material for adult readers. The poem "A Negro Speaks of River," which marked this development, appeared in the Crisis magazine in Meanwhile, the Crisis printed several more of his poems.
Finding the atmosphere at Columbia unfriendly, Hughes left after a year. He took on odd jobs in New York, and in he signed on to work on a freighter a large ship. His first voyage took him down the west coast of Africa; his second took him to Spain. In he spent six months in Paris, France. He was relatively happy, produced Langston Hughes. Most of this verse poetry appeared in African American publications, but Vanity Fair, a magazine popular among middle-and upper-class women, published three poems.
Later in Hughes went to live with his mother in Washington, D. He hoped to earn enough money to return to college, but work as a hotel busboy paid very little, and life in the nation's capital, where racial tensions were fierce, made him unhappy. But he was able to write many poems.
That summer one of his essays and another poem won prizes in the Crisis literary contest. Meanwhile, Hughes had come to the attention of Carl Van Vechten, a novelist and critic, who arranged publication of Hughes's first volume of poetry, The Weary Blues This book projected Hughes's lasting themes, established his style, and suggested the wide range of his poetic talent.
It showed him committed to racial themes—pride in blackness and in his African heritage, and the everyday life of African Americans—and democracy government ruled by the people and patriotism the support of one's country. Hughes transformed the bitterness which such themes generated in many African Americans of the day into sharp irony and humor.
His casual, folklike style was strengthened in his second book, Fine Clothes to the Jew Hughes had resumed his education in and graduated from Lincoln University in Not without Laughter was his first novel. His play Mulatto , first staged in , deals with many of the same themes as the most famous story in the collection, Cora Unashamed , which tells the story of a Black servant who develops a close emotional bond with the young white daughter of her employers.
Hughes became increasingly interested in the theater, and founded the New York Suitcase Theater with Paul Peters in After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in , he also co-founded a theater troupe in Los Angeles while co-writing the screenplay for the film Way Down South. Hughes imagined he would be an in-demand screenwriter in Hollywood; his failure to gain much success in the industry was put down to racism.
He wrote and published his autobiography The Big Sea in despite being only 28 years old; the chapter titled Black Renaissance discussed the literary movement in Harlem and inspired the name "Harlem Renaissance.
Continuing his interest in theater, Hughes founded the Skyloft Players in Chicago in and began writing a regular column for the Chicago Defender , which he would continue to write for two decades. Hughes attempted to interact with the new generation of Black artists by directly addressing them, but rejecting what he saw as their vulgarity and over-intellectual approach. His epic poem "suite," Montage of a Dream Deferred took inspiration from jazz music, collecting a series of related poems sharing the overarching theme of a "dream deferred" into something akin to a film montage—a series of images and short poems following quickly after each other in order to position references and symbolism together.
The most famous section from the larger poem is the most direct and powerful statement of the theme, known as Harlem :. Hughes continued to work throughout the s and was considered by many to be the leading writer of Black America at the time, although none of his works after Montage of a Dream Deferred approached the power and clarity of his work during his prime. Although Hughes had previously published a book for children in Popo and Fifina , in the s he began publishing books specifically for children regularly, including his First Book series, which was designed to instill a sense of pride in and respect for the cultural achievements of African Americans in its youth.
While Hughes reportedly had several affairs with women during his life, he never married or had children. Theories concerning his sexual orientation abound; many believe that Hughes, known for strong affections for Black men in his life, seeded clues about his homosexuality throughout his poems something Walt Whitman, one of his key influences, was known to do in his own work.
However, there is no overt evidence to support this, and some argue that Hughes was, if anything, asexual and uninterested in sex. Despite his early and long-term interest in socialism and his visit to the Soviet Union, Hughes denied being a communist when called to testify by Senator Joseph McCarthy. He then distanced himself from communism and socialism, and was thus estranged from the political left that had often supported him.
His work dealt less and less with political considerations after the mids as a result, and when he compiled the poems for his collection Selected Poems, he excluded most of his more politically-focused work from his youth. Hughes was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and entered the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City on May 22, to undergo surgery to treat the disease. Complications arose during the procedure, and Hughes passed away at the age of He was cremated, and his ashes interred in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, where the floor bears a design based on his poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers , including a line from the poem inscribed on the floor.
0コメント