...1020 Fall 2013 Biographical Research Essay Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri. He was the second child of Caroline Langston and James Hughes. After his parents' divorce his father left the country for Mexico and then Cuba to escape the racism of American society. After his divorce his mother traveled looking for work leaving Langston to be raised by his Grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas. Langston Hughes later lived with his mother again along with his new step-father in Cleveland, Ohio where he attended high school. In high school Hughes was elected to be the class poet. he felt that he was only chosen because he was African-American. "I was the victim of a stereotype. there were only two of us negro kids in the whole class and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry well, everyone knows, except us, that all negroes have rhythm, so they elected me as class poet." Hughes grew up and lived in an extremely racist time. he came from a long line of ant-slavery and also very politically active people on his mother's side. Hughes also had his own opinions on politics. like many black writers and artists of this time Hughes was drawn to the idea of communism rather than segregated America and lots of his work reflected that. his poetry was often published in the CPUSA newspaper. he was involved in many communist led organizations though was more of a sympathizer than an active participant. Hughes was accused by many of being a communist...
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...the themes in the works of Langston Hughes is inclusiveness. Inclusiveness is defined as including all parts of society and treating individuals fairly. Hughes started writing during the Harlem Renaissance, which was a new African American movement during the 1920’s and 1930’s. Hughes focused on modern, urban African American lifestyles and ultimately wanted fairness. During the Harlem Renaissance, most writers got inspiration from music and theatre. Some events that happened during this time would include African Americans being honored for their literary works which increasingly made this phase of literature. In result we have Hughes work. Inclusiveness is one of the themes throughout Hughes work, but specifically “I, too”, “Democracy”, and “Theme for English B” stand out strongly for describing how fairness and being included was a huge priority for African American’s during this time. In the poem, I, Too, Hughes portrays the idea of every race being equal. From the poem, Hughes says, “…they send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes…” (3-4), meaning that the African Americans were excluded from the guests of the house because they were not equal. Hughes portrays power and...
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...The Refection of Fountain Hughes Interview During Mr. Fountain Hughes interview I found myself touch by his words. It was emotional to listening to his voice. He discusses the issue of his life growing up as slave and what happen when he was finally free. My understanding that slaves were free after the civil war, but Mr. Hughes during his interview explain after he was free he did not know what to do or where to go. Even after being free, slaves like Mr. Hughes still struggle to coupe with life. To my knowledge I knew that Mr. Hughes had a tremendously rough life as a slave. He mention in his interview that “dogs where treated better then I was treated”. I did find that after being free Mr. Hughes still struggle to live. With no education...
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...Full Bright Scholars • This poem is about when he first saw Plath • Use of first person, draws us in. painstaking his own memory • "Where was it, in the strand? A display"- Questioning his memory. • "A picture of that year’s intake....."- Follows up with a series of statements. • "You" become the addressee • Very tightly Structured • Veronica Lake- actor • "Your Veronica Lake bang. Not what it hid"- Plath had a scar on her face • "It was the first fresh peach.....- returns to his own memory for the day. remembers an image • "It would appear blond. And your grin........"- change of tone • Events, feelings of memory are filtered by perspectives • "Was it then I bought a peach?"- England was coming out of the war, fruit was imported. • 1955- Plath arrived in England with a scholarship to Cambridge • She wanted everything to be perfect= writing. *Last four lines are structured around Powerful, alliterative, central imagery. The poem moves from uncertainly to certainly. • This poem is a formal address to Plath. eg Letter, Journal • Plath is the all American girl, capable, confident • Memory forms our perspective. memory is a partial truth • We only remember what is important. Therefore what memory we find is a partial truth • Photographs are also a perspective. They are often limited and distort. • In a photograph, it presents a mask, distorting the truth, perpetuating a perspective (happy and untroubled) • An essence, we don't really know what is hidden...
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...Langston Hughes was fully involved in the radicalism of the 1930s. His poetry from the period is strongly sympathetic toward the Soviet Union and the cause of international socialism. It shows a lack of patience with failure of American society to address either the racial oppression or the economic degradation and exploitation of the period both at home in the Depression and abroad in European colonialism. Hughes's career followed a varied path; he wrote prose fiction as well as poetry. He collaborated with visual artists and musicians. Within his poetry there is a great deal of variety as well. The Poem “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes, is a short twenty line poem that hass significant meaning in the short verse. Hughes uses an older female speaker to give advice to a son who is part of the younger generation. In the poem Hughes uses the device of an extended metaphor to describe the life of the mother. The extended metaphor compares the mother’s life to a staircase. The line “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair” begins and ends the poem. With this line, Hughes quickly establishes for us that the speaker in the poem has not had an easy life. The concept of the crystal staircase gives the reader the impression of great wealth. Us the readers can indulge in inferring that it would be someone with supreme wealth and someone who did not have to work as hard as the speaker did. By using the imagery of a crystal staircase as the opposite of her staircase, we immediately...
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...Comparative Essay Ginsberg, Hughes and Thoreau Confidence and self-reliance are qualities that are admired and desired by many people. Confidence is defined as a feeling or consciousness of one's powers or of reliance on one's circumstances, and a faith or belief that one will act in a right, proper, or effective way. Self-reliance is defined as the ability to care for one's self. Because people aspire to be confident and self-reliant, these qualities are common themes in literature. This essay compares three quotes, taken from three very different pieces of literature about American values, in which confidence and self-reliance are illustrated. “I refuse to give up my obsession. America, stop pushing. I know what I’m doing.” – Allen Ginsberg, “America.” Allen Ginsberg’s “America” presents a sharp criticism of American culture by someone who has almost completely rejected its values. The poem’s speaker addresses America directly, as if he were giving a lecture or a sermon to the nation itself instead of to the American people. The nation’s aggressive anticommunist foreign policy and its culture of materialism and conformity are the targets of the speaker’s criticism. This poem was written in 1956 and was one of the first widely read literary statements of political unrest in the post-World War II America. Themes from the recent wars are prominent such as the nuclear bomb or Asian foreign policy, but the poem also depicts national racial unrest...
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...In talking with Kevin Hughes during his interview, I immediately admired his ambition not only towards his job, but also his charismatic spirit. I found it very easy to relate to his style of leadership as well as to him as a person since he was also an Arcadia alum. For the interview process, I thought he gave very well thought out answers that highlighted not only his successes, but also some of his failures and what the takeaway was from those experiences. I always get a kick out of hearing people’s background stories because they always play a pivotal part in how a person approaches the world around them. Going into the interview, I quickly viewed his LinkedIn profile to get some background information so as not to be empty...
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...nonfiction short essay “Salvation” written by Langston Hughes in 1940, presents a theme on the literal and often manipulated perception of children. Hughes narrates the essay as he recounts his disappointing attempt at salvation. Hughes aunt told him that when she was saved by Jesus she saw a light, and felt something happen within herself. As children will do, Hughes took her story literally and was heartbroken as he sat in front of the church and watched other children “saved” while he was not. He believed that Jesus must not want him because he did not see or feel anything. In the end, Hughes is forced to lie about accepting Jesus and in turn rejects the Christian faith all together. I related to Hughes story on many accounts. I am a mother of three young children who perceive everything in life literally, and as a young girl I was raised in a very religious environment. I could visualize and almost feel Hughes devastation as he sat at the front of the church crushed by the thoughts of God not wanting him. “Still I kept waiting to see Jesus” (Barnet, Cain, & Burto, 2011, pp. 351). One of the churches that my family attended for a short time during my childhood practiced speaking in tongs. I specifically remember feeling just like Hughes during a service when other children were speaking in unnatural languages perceived to be sent from God himself. I could not understand why I was not chosen to talk for God and intern was hurt and ashamed of myself. Hughes uses several...
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...“I want to be a poet—not a Negro poet” (Hughes 348). In his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Langston Hughes covers many important points but his hook is one to mention. This hook focuses a lot on the main issue of the essay itself. The issue is that the negro poets want to write like the white poets implying that colored artists want to be white. This then leads to the fact that the white audiences turned to the artists of color and saw them as stereotypical entertainment mainly because these black artists were afraid of being themselves. Langston Hughes’s poem, “The Weary Blues” engages with themes of the Harlem Renaissance and the content of the poem expresses various issues Hughes discussed in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The poem, “The Weary Blues” is a powerful poem because it highlights the cultural traditions of the African American descent during a time of the Harlem Renaissance. The audience is able to...
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...Salvation", Langston Hughes Langston Hughes paints a picture of himself as a little boy whose decisions at a church revival directly reflect mans own instinctive behavioral tendencies for obedience. A young Langston whose congregation wants him to go up and get saved, gives into obedience and ventures to the altar as if he has seen the light of the Holy Spirit. Hughes goes on to say: " So I decided that maybe to save further trouble, I'd rather lie, too, and say that Jesus had come ,and get up and be saved ." In saying this, Langston has obviously overlooked his personal belief to meet the level of obedience laid out by the congregation. It leads us to fact that people may believe strongly in an idea or thought but will overlook that belief to be obedient. One can make a justified assumption that everyone in society has at one time or another overlooked his or her personal feelings to conform this occurrence whether it is instinctive or judgmental is one that each individual deals with a personal level. He was a young boy who wanted to see Jesus, who wanted to earn salvation, but when he couldn't see Jesus, when everyone else saw,he found himself in the terrible position of disappointing not only himself but everyone in his community.He finally "saved" himself by pretending to see Jesus . He was saved not by love of Jesus as a congregation or preacher intended but by pretending to be other that who he was. One wanders what would have happened if he didn't stepped forward...
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...|ELECTRONIC ASSIGNMENT COVERSHEET |[pic] | |Student Number |32065721 | |Surname |McDonald | |Given name |Suzanne | |Email |s_mac146@live.com | | | | |Unit Code |SSK12 | |Unit name |Introduction to University Learning | |Date |22 September 2012 | |Assignment name |Learning Log A | |Tutor |Greg Brotherson ...
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...Langston Hughes had been one of the leading black writers during the time period in which poetry had aided in altering the lives of a nation of African Americans. His works often consisted of racism and prejudice, along with oppression against blacks, the American working class, and since he tended to have traveled quite a bit, the struggle of peoples overseas. [Rose] Hughes is known for having produced many different forms of literature, specifically an original literary form of art known as jazz poetry. One of his more well known poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” provided for a solid unity for African Americans in that it responded with issues faced by blacks through a collaboration of music and culture. [Bender] Although some were opposed...
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...The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement started at the end of World War I, but only began to get recognized around 1924. The Harlem Renaissance was made up of chiefly writers and was considered a phenomenon. This movement started at a time when racism was still at large. African Americans had to deal with the KKK and other racial prejudices in society. The Harlem Renaissance was significant because it was the first time African Americans expressed their views on racism and their self-love for one another, using lyrical styles that was never seen before in African American writing. Two of the most prominent poets of the time were Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes. The Harlem Renaissance happened fifty seven years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Previously, African Americans didn’t have much education or a chance to make their mark in the literary world. They didn’t have much of a chance because they were still looked upon as inferior. They were also thought not to have a distinct cultural heritage. The United States got involved in World War I in the year 1917. At that time, race riots were happening and lynchings were frequent. After World War I ended in 1918, African Americans started coming to the North hoping to escape the racist treatment in the South. Unfortunately, life in the North wasn’t that much greater. In the South, more and more race riots occurred and many black people were beaten and killed-- this was known as “Red Summer” (Anderson...
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...John Dufresne once said “The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.” Surprisingly enough that is the primary difficulty I usually face when writing an essay. I focus too much on perfecting and planning out my essay. I spend hours deciding on my topic, writing the introduction paragraph and creating my thesis statement. In my opinion an author never gets a second chance to capture the attention of his or her reader. This is why I consider an effective introduction to be vital, it is a map that lays out what is going to be talked about in your paper. Ever since I was a child writing has always been very problematic for me. It takes a long time for me to transform my thoughts into words and put them on paper....
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...Analytical essay of Thank You M’am The short story “Thank You M’am” is written by the famous black writer Langston Hughes. This fictional text is about the teenager Roger, who tries to steal the purse of the large woman Mrs. Luella Bates Washington, who instead of reporting the boy to the police or run frightened away chooses to learn him an alternative lesson, by taking him to her house and wash his face. There is no place in the text that tells where the story takes place, but it is most likely that the location is somewhere in the United States, as Langston Hughes is American. The action in the story is in the street, where the boy and the woman meet, and in the woman’s house. The time of the story is probably around the 1950’s, as it is within the living period of Langston Hughes, but also the character Mrs. Washington works in a beauty shop (p. 3, l. 41), which was not a very common thing before the 50’s. There is no indications in the text that tell anything specific about the social environment, but as the boy, Roger tries to steal from Mrs. Washington, he is in all probability poor, and Mrs. Washington is probably from the middle class, as she has a house. In the story we meet two persons: The teenager boy, Roger and the woman, Mrs. Luella Bates Washington. Roger is around fourteen or fifteen years old, wearing blue jeans and tennis shoes, and he was also looking frail (p. 1, ll. 35-36). It is possible that he does not have any one to take care of him, but it is also...
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