Critical Essays on Langston Hughes PDF Download

Author: Edward J. Mullen
Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA
ISBN:
Category : African Americans in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 224

View

Book Description
Contains a collection of reviews and essays on the work of Langston Hughes.

Author: Henry L. Gates
Publisher: Harper Perennial
ISBN: 9781567430295
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

View

Book Description
James Langston Hughes (1902 -- 1967) With a career that spanned the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and Black Arts movement of the sixties, Langston Hughes was the most prolific Black poet of his era. Between 1926, when he published his pioneering The Weary Blues, to 1967, the year of his death, when he published The Panther and the Lash, Hughes would write sixteen books of poems, two novels, seven collections of short stories, two autobiographies, five works of nonfiction, and nine children's books; he would edit nine anthologies of poetry, folklore, short fiction, and humor. He also translated Jaques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén, Gabriela Mistral, Federico Garcia Lorca, and write at least thirty plays. It is not surprising that Hughes was known, variously, as "Shakespeare in Harlem" and as the "poet laureate of the American Negro." -- from the Preface by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 0791096122
Category : African American poets
Languages : en
Pages : 257

View

Book Description
Poet, playwright, novelist, and public figure, Langston Hughes is regarded as a cultural hero who made his mark during the Harlem Renaissance. A prolific author, Hughes focused his writing on discrimination in and disillusionment with American society. His most noted works include the novel ""Not Without Laughter"", the poem ""The Negro Speaks of Rivers,"" and the essay ""The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"", to name just a few. ""Langston Hughes, New Edition"" features compelling critical essays that create a well-rounded portrait of this great American writer. An introductory essay by Harold Bloom and a chronology tracing the major events in Hughes' life add further depth to this newly updated study tool.

Author: Langston Hughes
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486113906
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

View

Book Description
Poet Langston Hughes' only novel, a coming-of-age tale that unfolds amid an African American family in rural Kansas, explores the dilemmas of life in a racially divided society.

Author: Langston Hughes
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0385353561
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 482

View

Book Description
This is the first comprehensive selection from the correspondence of the iconic and beloved Langston Hughes. It offers a life in letters that showcases his many struggles as well as his memorable achievements. Arranged by decade and linked by expert commentary, the volume guides us through Hughes’s journey in all its aspects: personal, political, practical, and—above all—literary. His letters range from those written to family members, notably his father (who opposed Langston’s literary ambitions), and to friends, fellow artists, critics, and readers who sought him out by mail. These figures include personalities such as Carl Van Vechten, Blanche Knopf, Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Vachel Lindsay, Ezra Pound, Richard Wright, Kurt Weill, Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Alice Walker, Amiri Baraka, and Muhammad Ali. The letters tell the story of a determined poet precociously finding his mature voice; struggling to realize his literary goals in an environment generally hostile to blacks; reaching out bravely to the young and challenging them to aspire beyond the bonds of segregation; using his artistic prestige to serve the disenfranchised and the cause of social justice; irrepressibly laughing at the world despite its quirks and humiliations. Venturing bravely on what he called the “big sea” of life, Hughes made his way forward always aware that his only hope of self-fulfillment and a sense of personal integrity lay in diligently pursuing his literary vocation. Hughes’s voice in these pages, enhanced by photographs and quotations from his poetry, allows us to know him intimately and gives us an unusually rich picture of this generous, visionary, gratifyingly good man who was also a genius of modern American letters.

Author: John Edgar Tidwell
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826265960
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 373

View

Book Description
Over a forty six year career, Langston Hughes experimented with black folk expressive culture, creating an enduring body of extraordinary imaginative and critical writing. Riding the crest of African American creative energy from the Harlem Renaissance to the onset of Black Power, he commanded an artistic prowess that survives in the legacy he bequeathed to a younger generation of writers, including award winners Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and Amiri Baraka. Montage of a Dream extends and deepens previous scholarship, multiplying the ways in which Hughes's diverse body of writing can be explored. The contributors, including such distinguished scholars as Steven Tracy, Trudier Harris, Juda Bennett, Lorenzo Thomas, and Christopher C. De Santis, carefully reexamine the significance of his work and life for their continuing relevance to American, African American, and diasporic literatures and cultures. Probing anew among Hughes's fiction, biographies, poetry, drama, essays, and other writings, the contributors assert fresh perspectives on the often overlooked "Luani of the Jungles" and Black Magic and offer insightful rereadings of such familiar pieces as "Cora Unashamed," "Slave on the Block," and Not without Laughter. In addition to analyzing specific works, the contributors astutely consider subjects either lightly explored by or unavailable to earlier scholars, including dance, queer studies, black masculinity, and children's literature. Some investigate Hughes's use of religious themes and his passion for the blues as the fabric of black art and life; others ponder more vexing questions such as Hughes's sexuality and his relationship with his mother, as revealed in the letters she sent him in the last decade of her life. Montage of a Dream richly captures the power of one man's art to imagine an America holding fast to its ideals while forging unity out of its cultural diversity. By showing that Langston Hughes continues to speak to the fundamentals of human nature, this comprehensive reconsideration invites a renewed appreciation of Hughes's work and encourages new readers to discover his enduring relevance as they seek to understand the world in which we all live.

Author: Arnold Rampersad
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195146425
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242

View

Book Description
The second volume in this biography finds Langston Hughes rooting himself in Harlem, receiving stimulation from his rich cultural surroundings. Here he rethought his view of art and radicalism and cultivated relationships with younger, more militant writers such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.

Author: Yuval Taylor
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393243923
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 340

View

Book Description
A Finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography “A complete pleasure to read.” —Lisa Page, Washington Post Novelist Zora Neale Hurston and poet Langston Hughes, two of America’s greatest writers, first met in New York City in 1925. Drawn to each other, they helped launch a radical journal, Fire!! Later, meeting by accident in Alabama, they became close as they traveled together—Hurston interviewing African Americans for folk stories, Hughes getting his first taste of the deep South. By illuminating their lives, work, competitiveness, and ambitions, Yuval Taylor savvily details how their friendship and literary collaborations dead-ended in acrimonious accusations.

Author: Donald B. Gibson
Publisher: Prentice Hall
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

View

Book Description
Twelve critical essays sketch the tradition of black poets in the U. S. from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920's to the black rage of the 1970's. Separate critiques are devoted to the work of Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Melvin B. Tolson, Robert Hayden, and Imamu Amiri Baraka.

Author: Langston Hughes
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466894865
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

View

Book Description
Langston Hughes's stories about Jesse B. Semple--first composed for a weekly column in the Chicago Defender and then collected in Simple Speaks His Mind, Simple Takes a Wife, and Simple Stakes a Claim--have been read and loved by hundreds of thousands of readers. In The Best of Simple, the author picked his favorites from these earlier volumes, stories that not only have proved popular but are now part of a great and growing literary tradition. Simple might be considered an Everyman for black Americans. Hughes himself wrote: "...these tales are about a great many people--although they are stories about no specific persons as such. But it is impossible to live in Harlem and not know at least a hundred Simples, fifty Joyces, twenty-five Zaritas, and several Cousin Minnies--or reasonable facsimiles thereof." As Arnold Rampersad has written, Simple is "one of the most memorable and winning characters in the annals of American literature, justly regarded as one of Hughes's most inspired creations."