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The Harlem Renaissance can be considered on of the most significant events in African-American literature and culture in the twentieth century. While its most obvious manifestation was as a self-conscious literary movement, it also touched almost every aspect of African-American culture and intellectual life in the period from World War I to the Great Depression: it's impact redefined black music, theater, and visual arts; it reflected a new more militant political and racial consciousness and racial pride that was associated with the term "New Negro;" it embodied the struggle for civil rights and most important, was its force as a literary and intellectual movement (Hutchinson 125). With this outburst of literary activity, a man named Langston Hughes started to write poems about life in Harlem. Hughes's poetry absorbed the rhythms of blues and jazz and the dialect of African-American speech that he heard around him. He had written through the 1930s and the 1940s, speaking fo!r the poor and homeless black people who suffered during the Great Depression. He wrote of their daily lives in American cities, of their anger and their loves. Black people loved reading his works and hearing him read his poems at public presentations
This became a rallying call to young black writers of the twenties concerned with reconciling artistic freedom with racial expression: The Great Depression forced Hughes to reconsider the relation between his poetry and his people. It is obvious that this encouragement was much of Langston Hughes'("The Harlem Renaissance"). Hughes' efforts to create a poetry that truly evoked the spirit of Black America involved a resolution of conflicts centering around the problem of identity. Hughes spoke of a dilemma concerning the problems of the black writer in America in "The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain:" during the Harlem Renaissance as a valid statement on Negro life in America ("Langston"). Of the major Black writers who first made their appearance during the exciting period of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes was the most prolific and the most successful. As the Harlem Renaissance gave way to the Depression, Hughes was determined to sustain his career as a poet by bringing his poetry to the people. Hughes said: serious and very much a part of him. He was afraid other people might not like them or understand them. Hughes was required to sacrifice some degree of emotional stability. He believed personal unhappiness was the cornerstones of his best works and that it followed that in order to maintain the singleness of purpose and devotion to his work (Ostendorf 175). This is what won Hughes the title of the "Negro poet of Laureate."
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1764
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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