Search results
Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays.
- Let America Be America Again
Let America Be America Again - Langston Hughes | Poetry...
- I Look at The World
Why poetry is necessary and sought after during crises. Read...
- Dreams
Dreams - Langston Hughes | Poetry Foundation
- Harlem
Harlem - Langston Hughes | Poetry Foundation
- The Negro Speaks of Rivers
The Negro Speaks of Rivers - Langston Hughes | Poetry...
- Brass Spittoons
Brass Spittoons - Langston Hughes | Poetry Foundation
- Morning After
Morning After - Langston Hughes | Poetry Foundation
- You and Your Whole Race
You and Your Whole Race - Langston Hughes | Poetry...
- Let America Be America Again
Walt Whitman. Henry David Thoreau. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Edgar Allan Poe. (Show more) American Renaissance, period from the 1830s roughly until the end of the American Civil War in which American literature, in the wake of the Romantic movement, came of age as an expression of a national spirit.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
People also ask
What was the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance?
What was the American Renaissance?
What was the American Renaissance period of literature?
Who were the most famous black women poets of the Harlem Renaissance?
- Langston Hughes
- Zora Neale Hurston
- Countee Cullen
- Claude Mckay
- Jessie Redmon Fauset
- Jean Toomer
- Nella Larsen
Born in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes moved around a lot as a child until his family settled in Cleveland, Ohio. He wrote his first and most famous poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” soon after graduating from high school. While studying at Columbia University in New York City, he embraced Harlem culture, especially the popular jazz and blues m...
After growing up in rural Alabama and Florida, Zora Neale Hurston attended Howard University and won a scholarship to Barnard College in 1925, which brought her into the heart of Harlem culture. A trained anthropologist who traveled to Haiti and Jamaica for research, Hurston gained attention in the 1930s for her collection of African American folkt...
The Kentucky-born Countee Porter was unofficially adopted at age 15 by F.A. Cullen, minister of a leading Methodist church in Harlem. While attending New York University, Countee Cullen began publishing his poems in The Crisis, the literary magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) co-founded by W.E.B. Du Bo...
Born in Jamaica, Claude McKay came to the United States to attend college, but left school in 1914 and settled in Harlem. After publishing “If We Must Die,” one of his best-known poems, in 1919 he traveled in Europe and lived in London, returning to the United States in 1921. McKay’s collection Harlem Shadows (1922) established him as a major voice...
A 1905 graduate of Cornell University (where she was possibly the first Black female student), Jessie Redmon Fauset was working as a teacher when she began writing for The Crisis. In 1919, she moved to New York to become the magazine’s literary editor, helping to introduce writers such as Cullen, Hughes and McKay to national audiences. In addition ...
Born in Washington, D.C., Jean Toomer came from a family with both white and Black heritage, and his grandfather had been the first Black governor in the United States during Reconstruction. After attending the City College of New York, Toomer wrote poetry and prose for several years, then moved to Georgia in 1921 to take a teaching job. The experi...
The daughter of a white mother from Denmark and a Black West Indian father, Nella Larsenwas raised in a mostly white environment in Chicago after her father disappeared and her mother remarried a white Danish man. She studied nursing at a school in the Bronx created to train Black nurses, and returned to work there in 1916. Alongside her husband, t...
- Sarah Pruitt
May 14, 2004 · With a lyricism seated in the popular blues and jazz music of the time, an awareness of Black life in America, its assertion of an independent African American identity, and its innovation in form and structure, the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance is unmistakable.
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s famed poetry collection, was first published in 1855 but was expanded and edited over the following years. The first time it was published the collection held twelve poems. By the time he died, he’d expanded it to include over 400.
Harlem Renaissance poets such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Georgia Douglas Johnson explored the beauty and pain of black life and sought to define themselves and their community outside of white stereotypes. Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance reflected a diversity of forms and subjects.
Weaving together poems, sketches, short stories, and dramatic narratives, the book seamlessly melded high Modernist literary techniques with African American style and subject matter that alternated between the rural South and the urban North.
