Hughes

Informationen zum Autor LANGSTON HUGHES was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. By the time he enrolled in Columbia University he had already launched his literary career with his poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," published in Crisis in 1921. Often regarded as "the poet laureate of Harlem," Hughes was a cental figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Known for his insightful, colorful portayals of black life in America from the 1920s to the 1960s, Hughes published more than thirty-five books of poetry, fiction, short stories, children's poetry, musicals, operans, autobiography, scripts, and essays. Throughout hs life Hughes was a devoted fan of black music, and he fushed together jazz and blues with traditional verse in his first two books, The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to the Jew . He was also well known for his creation of the fictional character Jess B. Semple, nicknamed Simple, who satrized racial injustices. In 1929, Hughes earned his B.A. from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he was later presented with an honorary Litt.D. Over the course of his life, Hughes was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rosenwald Fellowship, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Grant. Hughes died in 1967. Through his work condeming racism and celebrating African-American culture, Langston Hughes becaomse one of the most influential and esteemed writers of the twentieth-century. Klappentext Arguably the most important writer to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and '30s, Langston Hughes was a great poet and a shrewd and lively storyteller. Hughes's work blends elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant and wholly original idiom. Vintage Hughes includes the poems "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "I, Too," "The Weary Blues," "America," "Let America Be America Again," "Dream Variations," "Young Sailor," "Afro-American Fragment," "Scottsboro," "The Negro Mother," "Good Morning Revolution," "I Dream a World," "The Heart of Harlem," "Freedom Train," "Song for Billie Holliday," "Nightmare Boogie," "Africa," "Black Panther," "Birmingham Sunday," and "UnAmerican Investigators"; and three stories from the collection The Ways of White Folks: "Cora Unashamed," "Home," and "The Blues I'm Playing."...

Autorentext
LANGSTON HUGHES was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. By the time he enrolled in Columbia University he had already launched his literary career with his poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," published in Crisis in 1921. Often regarded as "the poet laureate of Harlem," Hughes was a cental figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Known for his insightful, colorful portayals of black life in America from the 1920s to the 1960s, Hughes published more than thirty-five books of poetry, fiction, short stories, children's poetry, musicals, operans, autobiography, scripts, and essays.

Throughout hs life Hughes was a devoted fan of black music, and he fushed together jazz and blues with traditional verse in his first two books, The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to the Jew. He was also well known for his creation of the fictional character Jess B. Semple, nicknamed Simple, who satrized racial injustices. In 1929, Hughes earned his B.A. from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he was later presented with an honorary Litt.D. Over the course of his life, Hughes was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rosenwald Fellowship, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Grant. Hughes died in 1967. 

Through his work condeming racism and celebrating African-American culture, Langston Hughes becaomse one of the most influential and esteemed writers of the twentieth-century.

Klappentext

Arguably the most important writer to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and '30s, Langston Hughes was a great poet and a shrewd and lively storyteller.

Hughes's work blends elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant and wholly original idiom.

Vintage Hughes includes the poems "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "I, Too," "The Weary Blues," "America," "Let America Be America Again," "Dream Variations," "Young Sailor," "Afro-American Fragment," "Scottsboro," "The Negro Mother," "Good Morning Revolution," "I Dream a World," "The Heart of Harlem," "Freedom Train," "Song for Billie Holliday," "Nightmare Boogie," "Africa," "Black Panther," "Birmingham Sunday," and "UnAmerican Investigators"; and three stories from the collection The Ways of White Folks: "Cora Unashamed," "Home," and "The Blues I'm Playing."

Zusammenfassung
Langston Hughes is a titanic figure in 20th-century American literature . . . a powerful interpreter of the American experience. The Philadelphia Inquirer

Leseprobe
The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers:

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Aunt Sue's Stories

Aunt Sue has a head full of stories.

Aunt Sue has a whole heart full of stories.

Summer nights on the front porch

Aunt Sue cuddles a brown-faced child to her bosom

And tells him stories.

Black slaves

Working in the hot sun,

And black slaves

Walking in the dewy night,

And black slaves

Singing sorrow songs on the banks of a mighty river

Mingle themselves softly

In the flow of old Aunt Sue's voice,

Mingle themselves softly

In the dark shadows that cross and recross

Aunt Sue's stories.

And the dark-faced child, listening,

Knows that Aunt Sue's stories are real stories.

He knows that Aunt Sue never got her stories

Out of any book at all,

But that they came

Right out of her own life.

The dark-faced child is quiet

Of a summer night

Listening to Aunt Sue's stories.

Negro

I am a Negro:

Black as the night is black,

Black like the depths of my Africa.

I've been a slave:

Caesar told me to keep his door-steps clean.

I brushed the boots of Washington.

I've been a worker:

Under my hands the pyramids arose.

I made mortar for the Woolworth Building.

I've been a singer:

All the way from Africa to Georgia

I carried my sorrow songs.

I made ragtime.

I've been a victim:

The Belgians cut off my hands in the Congo.

They lynch me still in Mississippi.

I am a Negro:

Black as the night is black,

Black like the depths of my Africa.

Mexican Market Woman

This ancient hag

Who sits upon the ground

Selling her scanty wares

Day in, day round,

Has known high wind-swept mountains,

And the sun has made

Her skin so brown.

The South

The lazy, laughing South

With blood on its mouth.

The sunny-faced South,

Beast-strong,

Idiot-brained.

The child-minded South

Scratching in the dead fire's ashes

For a Negro's bones.

Cotton and the moon,

Warmth, earth, warmth,

The sky, the sun, the stars,

The magnolia-scented South.

Beautiful, like a woman,

Seductive as a dark-eyed whore,

Passionate, cruel,

Honey-lipped, syphilitic-

That is the South.

And I, who am black, would love her

But she spits in my face.

And I, who am black,

Would give her many rare gifts

But she turns her back upon me.

So now I seek t…