James Mercer Langston Hughes
|
Chapter 1: Parents and Children James Mercer Langston Hughes |
|
Langston Hughes
|
||
|
James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Missouri in 1902 and reared in Kansas and Ohio. After living for a year in Mexico he attended Columbia University, but left after one year. He received a B.A. from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1929, and when he came to New York he soon became one of the leading figures in the Harlem Renaissance, an energetic burst of African-American literary creativity that also included Countée Cullen and Claude McKay. Over the next forty-five years, Hughes was to write in every major literary genre, including translations, regular columns for a weekly newspaper, and reports on the Spanish Civil War. His earliest works were poems that he published in the Crisis, the official journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Eventually he published fourteen books of poems and two novels, together with a number of short-story collections and many plays and texts for musical plays. The Great Depression, which began with the New York stock market crash in 1929, destroyed the economic underpinnings of the Harlem Renaissance. It was during the Depression that Hughes became radicalized. After visiting Haiti and Cuba he attacked what he considered American imperialist interventions in those countries. He then spent a year in Soviet Russia, assisting in the preparation of a film on American race relations. When he returned he published his first collection of stories, The Ways of White Folks (1934), in which he fictionalized his disaffection with the condition of both southern and northern African-Americans. One of the stories included in this collection was "Father and Son," a version of the material that he turned into the two-act play Mulatto, which was produced at the Vanderbilt Theater in New York in October 1935. The play had a run of 373 performances, the record at that time for a Broadway play by an African-American dramatist. At that time, the growing African-American theater was dominated by two major themes, the first being the customs and problems of southern blacks. The most pressing problem was of course the cruelty and injustice of lynching. Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel (1920) and James Miller’s Never No More (1932) openly condemned the practice. Dennis Donaghue’s Legal Murder (1934) was an attack on the false conviction for rape of nine young black men from Scottsboro, Alabama, a topic that Hughes also treated in his early drama Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play in Verse (1932). The second major theme concerned the adjustments that blacks needed to make after they left the south and migrated to cities in the north. Frank Wilson’s Meek Mose was perhaps the most optimistic of these plays, in which dispossessed blacks discover oil on their new property. More typical were Garland Anderson’s Appearances (1925), about how a black bellhop overcomes false charges of rape, and Wallace Thurman’s Harlem (1929), about the difficulties of a black family living in Chicago. This theme also dominates Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), the classic drama that marked the coming of age of post-World War II African-American playwrights. Author Links
|
"Mother to Son"
|
A Pearson Company Distance Learning at Prentice Hall Legal Notice |
