Realism In Theme For English B, By Langston Hughes

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Born in Joplin, Missouri Langston Hughes quickly became the most popular and versatile of the many writers who were within the Harlem Renaissance. Raised by his mother and grandmother, because his father moved to Mexico to get away from racism. Hughes finished high school and immediately started writing poetry. He chose to focus his work on modern, and urban black life. With influences from Walt Whitman Majority of Hughes’s poems portrayed similar themes such as racism, The American Dream, wisdom, aspiration, dignity, self-Actualization, realism, and modernism, that all had to do with black life from the twenties through the sixties. He wanted to show the difference between personal experience and common experience of African Americans Although …show more content…

This poem discusses the realist issues known to a black man, which is fitting in to American society. Hughes narrates in the voice of a young African American boy writing a paper responding to the prompt “let that page come out of you—Then it will be true.” Throughout the poem the narrator exposes many characteristics of himself: “the narrator reveals many aspects of himself, sometimes directly, and sometimes not, but his self-portrait remains incomplete” (Cone, Facts On File). Hughes does not go into much detail about himself only stating that he is black, twenty-two years old, born in the south, goes to school at Columbia University, and lives in Harlem. But by his choice of words other things can be concluded. He says that he went to different schools growing up: “He tells us he went to different schools in North Carolina before moving to New York” (Cone). Hughes used realism in giving us detail about his pass, which suggests that he was like the typical blacks during this time period, migrating from their southern homes with their southern values to urban areas up north such as New York, Chicago, and Detroit. Hughes giving us details about his past schools suggests that the: “experience of racism…” (Cone) which he no longer wanted to deal with, this is realism because this issue was an on going thing for Langston

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