7/3/2023 0 Comments Hughes the big sea![]() ![]() He believed that they "had as much in their lives to put into books as did those more fortunate." Thus, the black folk idiom, the rhythm and tones of its language and music, was the only choice for Hughes, and he became the poet laureate of the people for one simple reason-he spoke their language. In nearly everything he wrote, and he wrote more than fifty books in every conceivable genre, he sought to capture the complexities of, and pay homage to such people, especially those who were poor or of modest means. I think he hated himself, too, for being a Negro." Unlike his father, early in life Hughes had been seduced by the joie de vivre of a people who simply could have been bitter because their lives were filled with injustice. Hughes wrote in his autobiography The Big Sea (1940) that "my father hated Negroes. Perhaps his determination to affirm, indeed revel in, black culture had something to do with his father's hatred of black people, a sentiment that affected the son profoundly. ![]() In the essay, he argues against blacks seeking integration at the expense of race pride and proclaims that instead "we younger artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame," a bold statement for those racially unsettling times that were marked by lynchings and riots. With his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926), writer Langston Hughes helped to define the spirit that motivated the Harlem Renaissance, a black cultural movement of the 1920s. ![]()
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