The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
1926
First Published
4.39
Average Rating
14
Number of Pages
Hughes' essay addressed the issues of the Harlem Renaissance as it celebrated African American creative innovations such as blues, spirituals, jazz, and literary work that engaged African American life. Hughes understood a fellow African American poet's stated desire to be "a poet—not a Negro poet" as that poet's wish to look away from his African American heritage and instead absorb white culture. This urge within the race towards whiteness, the desire to pour racial distinctiveness into the mould of American standardisation, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible, Hughes observes, "is the mountain standing in the path of any authentic Black art in America."
Avg Rating
4.39
Number of Ratings
163
5 STARS
53%
4 STARS
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3 STARS
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2 STARS
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1 STARS
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Author
Langston Hughes
Author · 71 books
Through poetry, prose, and drama, American writer James Langston Hughes made important contributions to the Harlem renaissance; his best-known works include Weary Blues (1926) and The Ways of White Folks (1934). People best know this social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist James Mercer Langston Hughes, one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry, for his famous written work about the period, when "Harlem was in vogue." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langsto...
