James Mecer Langston Hughes: Literary Genius

Author's Craft Essay In the story Thank you Ma’am the author Langston Hughes uses narration, Descriptive language, and dialog to provide background information, introduce characters, and build suspense within the story. In the beginning of the story the author uses a narrator to build suspense. An example of this is on page 1 the narrator states “It was about eleven o'clock at night and she was walking alone when a boy ran up behind he and tried to snatch her purse.”

The upper-class blacks shunned the lower class viewing them as being “embarrassingly vulgar” (Dickinson 323). Overcoming African-American prejudice was a major focus in most of Hughes’ writing. For example, he wrote about the joys, sorrows and hopes of the black man in America (Dickinson 321). Not all of his writings were so encouraging however. Other themes Hughes wrote about include lynchings, rapes, discrimination, and Jim Crow Laws. He commented that when he felt bad, he wrote a great deal of poetry; when he was happy, he didn’t write any (Dickinson 321).

and for, one of the reasons that Hughes began to draw on the blues tradition for writing his

     In order for a person to really understand how Mr. Hughes’s life shaped his poetry, one must know all about his background. In this paper, I will write a short biography of Hughes’s life and tell how this helped accent his

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. He grew up mainly in Lawrence, Kansas but also lived in Illinois, Ohio and Mexico. Constantly having to travel he wrote his poem that would make him famous, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”. Having different expectations his parents slit up resulting in him living with his maternal grandmother.

Langston Hughes was born on February 2, 1902 in Joplin Missouri, and died on May 22, 1967 in New York, New York. Hughes' African American themes helped to contribute to the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, where he was a leader. He attended Columbia University and Lincoln University, published his first poem in 1921 and his first book in 1926. Hughes was a poet, playwright, novelist, and more.

Langston Hughes is regarded as one of the most significant American authors of the twentieth century. Foremost a poet, he was the first African-American to earn a living solely from his writings after he became established. Over a forty-year career beginning in the 1920s until his death in 1967, Hughes produced poetry, plays, novels, and a variety of nonfiction. He is perhaps best known for his creation of the fictional character, Jesse B. Semple, which first appeared in a Chicago Defender newspaper column in 1943. Hughes’ writings focused mainly on the lives of plain black people and show their beauty, wisdom, and strength to overcome social and economic injustice.

As England’s Poet Laureate, and recipient of both the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and T.S. Eliot’s prize for poetry, Ted Hughes was an acclaimed poet. The shadow of Hughes late wife, Sylvia Plath, kept Hughes stagnant in his career, in which he was known as “Her Husband” (Middlebrook). Hughes most recent collection of poems, Birthday Letters, took him over twenty-five years to write, and contains poems which recount the marriage of the couple. Hughes wrote the poems as a loving gesture towards Sylvia, but the poems were misinterpreted as “an attempt to adjust the public record in the wake of her confession and the mass of commentary which has grown up around them” (Spurr 3). Hughes incorporated into his poetry the ideals of

Langston Hughes is one the most renowned and respected authors of twentieth century America not simply one of the most respected African-American authors, though he is certainly this as well, but one of the most respected authors of the period overall. A large part of the respect and admiration that the man and his work have garnered is due to the richness an complexity of Hughes' writing, both his poetry and his prose and even his non-fictions. In almost all of his texts, Hughes manages at once to develop and explore the many intricacies and interactions of the human condition and specifically of the experience growing up and living as a black individual in a white-dominated and explicitly anti-Black society while at the same time, while at the same time rendering his human characters and their emotions in a simple, straightforward, and immensely accessible fashion. Reading the complexity behind the surface simplicity of his works is at once enjoyable and edifying.

“James Mercer Langston Hughes, known as Langston Hughes was born February 2, 1902 in Missouri, to Carrie Hughes and James Hughes.” Years later his parents separated. Langston’s father moved to Mexico and became very successful, as his for mother, she moved frequently to find better jobs. As a child growing up Langston spent most of his childhood living with his grandmother named Mary Langston in Lawrence, Kansas. Mary Langston was a learned women and a participant in the civil rights Movement. When Langston Hughes was 12 years old his grandmother passed away. Langston then moved in with his mother and stepfather Homer Clark. A few months later, Langston’s mother sent him to live with her mother’s friend “Auntie” and Mr. Reed. In 1915

Hughes is a child from a mix background, he is part African American, White, and Native American. Comparatively, this poem is possibly a small aspect of

Langston Hughes, an African American writer who interpreted to the world the black experience in the US and portrayed them with skill and insight, was born February 1st, 1902 into the home of the couple James and Carrie Hughes. Hughes ' mother attended college and had an artistic temperament. James Nathanial Hughes was a prosperous lawyer and rancher in Mexico who disliked the black poor and hated Negroes. On April 30, 1899, in Guthrie, Oklahoma, him and his wife Carrie were married and were pregnant within a few days after the wedding. When the U.S. census taker came around on June 5, 1900 the tragedy struck couple reported the loss of their first child, a boy; apparently he was buried earlier that year. Langston came along next and soon after his parents separated. When Langston was between the age of 5 and 7 his parents tried to reconcile with each other in Mexico. The reunion ended on the night of April 14, 1907 after an earthquake shook the ground over a vast region in Mexico. After the incident Carrie, her mother and her son fled Mexico. Hughes was raised by his mother, who later married Homer Clark, and his grandmother, who had served as a conductor on the Underground Railroad with her husband earlier in her life. Langston lived in about half a dozen cities before him and his new family settled in Cleveland. Langston Hughes found his first job; he gathered maple seeds and most likely sold them to the Bartheldes Seed Company.

Throughout his works, especially his poetry, Hughes also draws inspiration from music. He describes the blues as ‘“sad funny songs – too sad to be funny and too funny to be sad”’ as the songs hold ‘“laughter and pain, hunger and heartache”’ (Poetry Criticism). This point of view is noticeably reflected onto his poems when some stanzas are in the “form of the typical blues song” (Poetry Criticism). In other words, the stanza had two nearly identical lines followed by a third that contrasts the first two and this is seen in Same in Blues where he uses the repetition of the word “baby” in the first two lines. In his poetry, Hughes captures the voices, experience, emotions and spirit of the African Americans during this time. His poems have also been influenced by the Afro-American life essays written by W.E.B. DuBois and the black vernacular (DiYanni p.700-705). This is shown in Fine Clothes to the Jew, as Hughes addresses the hardship and struggle of urban African Americans in Harlem who left the deep south in hopes of achieving their American Dream. However,

Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902. Hughes faced a difficult childhood, which fueled his creative writing. He was hailed as perhaps the most promising writer of the artistic movement referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. He was known for writing mostly about the struggles of African Americans. “Much of his writing emphasizes the American aspect of being African American, particularly the right of all blacks to pursue their part of the American Dream,” according to page 140 of Cornerstones: An Anthology of African American Literature, by Melvin Burke Donalson.

John Knowles was an American author who was born in September 16, 1926 in Fairmont, West Virginia. He attended St. Peter’s high school in Fairmont, Virginia from 1938 to 1940 before finishing at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire in 1945. Following his time at Phillips Exeter Academy, he served in the U.S. Army for two years during the WWII.He graduated in Yale University in 1949. While he was at Yale, he contributed stories to campus humor magazine The Yale Record , served on the board of the Yale Daily News and was the editorial secretary his senior year. Early on his career, he wrote for the Hartford Courant and was an assistant editor for holiday magazine. With an encouragement by Thornton Wilder, an American playwright and novelist,