This 28 paged book quoting authorities on Hughes with ten of his poems quoted mostly in full and discussed one is sure to
arrive at a greater intimacy with the work of this versatile but remarkable
black writer.Hughes was always determined to break new ground rather than keep slavishly following the tyranny of tight stanzaic forms and exact rhyme. Like Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, he preferred writing verse which captured accurately and realistically American speech and was equally attuned to the varieties of black American speech.In many poems like "The Weary Blues" various elements such as the common speech of ordinary people, jazz and blues and the traditional poetic forms were adapted to African-American and American subjects. This experimentation frequently yielding inventively rhythmic free verse was intensified in succeeding collections.Even though Hughes’ fearless and ‘tasteless’ evocation of lower-class black culture including its sometimes raw erotism shocked many reviewers in black publications, he remained defiantly unrepentant stating that young Negro artists were firmly resolved to continue expressing and celebrating their identity as blacks without fear or shame irregardless of the reactions of whites. But at the same time he promised that in their representation of both their beauty and their ugliness they would be fair and balanced. Hughes thus became both a champion and a beacon of light to younger writers in their quest to assert their right to explore and exploit allegedly degraded aspects of black culture and civilization.Hughes continued publishing
poetry, short stories and essays in mainstream as well as black-oriented periodicals. He even ventured out with other writers to found a literary journal devoted to African-American culture and aimed at destroying older forms of black literature. But unfortunately, it was short-lived.Back from a recuperative stay in Haiti, he turned to the political left and started publishing in New Masses, a journal of the Communist Party. After touring the South and West reading poetry in churches and schools he sailed for the Soviet Union amongst a group of young African-Americans invited to take part in a film about American race relations. But whilst there, struck by the power of the English novelist, short story writer and poet, D.H. Lawrence’s stories he got attracted into writing his own short fiction. He wrote enough short stories to be published in his first collection, the often acerbic and embittered The Ways of White Folks.
His interest then turned to the theater with his play Mulatto on race-mixing and the South emerging as the longest running play by an African American on Broadway until Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun in the 1960's. Hughes led the way to later avant-garde dramatists like Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez with such innovations as theatre-in-the round and his invoking of audience participation.With the onset of World War 11, Hughes returned to the political centre and published his first autobiographical work, The Big Sea, with its memorable portrait of the renaissance and his African voyages.
The work gives a satisfying and refreshing but also hilarious attention to Hughes' most fascinating and enduring Negro character introduced in his weekly column for the Chicago Defender. Through this comic James B. Simple, Hughes raises serious issues bothering on the frustrations of being black in America. Through him as well, he exposes the phoniness, hypocrisy and shallowness of white and black America alike. From his stool at Paddy's Bar, in a delightful brand of English he comments both wisely as well as hilariously on race and women among many other issues.
Simple comes out as a very articulate spokesman for the untrained worker group pitted against the educated Negro liberal represented by Hughes himself. Whatever bad thing happens to him is attributed to some remote origin in race. For as he says, "no matter what a man does, sick or well, something is always liable to happen especially if you are colored." For as he constantly keeps reminding us "a dark man shall see dark days." The work gives some attention to his other poetry collections in which some changes are effected to the content as well as form of his poetry as reflective of a changing black world - Harlem. His bebop-shaped Montage of a Dream Deferred projects the picture of a changing Harlem, fertile with humanity but in decline, and drastically deteriorated. It's exuberance and vitality is replaced by an urban ghetto plagued by poverty and crime. The rhythm of the poetry also changes in parallel to the change in tone. The abrupt, fragmented structure of post-war jazz and bebop replaces the smooth patterns and gentle melancholy of blues music. Alert to what was happening and what was to come, Hughes in this collection used much of the relatively new be-bop as well as jazz rhythms that emphasize dissonance in reflection of the new pressures being borne on black communities in the cities of the north. The other collection Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz comments irreverently on the turbulent early 1960's.
The realism and humanism seen in Hughes poetry could also be felt in his short stories, a sample of which are catalogued. He brought his experiences living in attics and basements which kept him close to those he wrote about as well as for, made his works very relevant and effective. Hughes thus ended up being almost universally recognized as the most representative and original African American writer