Richard Wright and Langston Hughes

Richard Wright and Langston Hughes

Richard Wright and Langston Hughes

Introduction

Richard Wright was born in Natchez, Mississippi on September 4, 1908. Richard and his mother moved to Jackson, Mississippi in 1918 after his father left the family. Richard was exposed to very strict religious codes by his grandmother. Wright began writing in 1924. He printed a short story entitled The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre in a local black newspaper, The Southern Register. The author had several odd jobs in Jackson and in Memphis, Tennessee between 1925 and 1927. He also began to read and study literature by authors such as Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser.

He worked for the Federal Negro Theatre and the Illinois Writer's Project. Wright began publishing short stories and in 1931, his story Superstition appeared in Abbott's Monthly.

Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri into a family with an extraordinary background . Hughes' family consisted of historical members. For starters, he had three grandfathers who were white therefore making Hughes not fully black. In addition, his uncle was elected to public office by public vote, his grandmother had attended college, one grandfather assisted with the underground railroad, and another aided John Brown during his raid on Harper's Ferry. His parents' ambitions were unrealistic for African Americans at the time, causing his father to move to Mexico to escape racism. This resulted in the separation of his parents. Following the desertion of his father, Hughes moves to live with his grandmother in Kansas while his mother goes to search for a steady job.

Thesis statement:

Wright wanted to draw attention to the social problems of the time. He felt it was partially his responsibility to point out the problems and help make people aware of the injustices going on in the African-American society while Hughes is considered an outstanding literary figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Discussion

As to his image as a writer offered in the studies devoted to him during the recent decades, it is a far cry from its oversimplified version of the 1940s. L. Bashmakova, who authored a dissertation on Wright (the only one in Russia so far), found a new way of tackling her subject. She strives towards a stereoscopic vision of Wright as black and as an American at once, as a bearer of both racial and generally American psychology. These issues of appropriate psychology run through her book addressing the African-American novel.

For Richard Wright the problem of self-identification provided the major quest of his life. Michel Fabre, in his magnificent study of Wright, reports that the young writer thought after first glimpsing existential philosophy "at Dorothy Norman's house" in 1946, that he "found that it fit in with his intimate vision of the world," and that "the more he learned, the more the philosophy seemed to correspond to his own vision of life and human responsibility. Thus, each day brought him closer to the existentialist ideal of the committed intellectual, the man who was always willing and ...