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Harlem Renaissance
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A famous Harlem Renaissance poet was Langston Hughes. He was born in Joplin, Missouri and later moved to Lincoln, Illinois at age thirteen where he began to write his poetry. Later moving to Washington, D.C. in 1924, his fist book of poetry called The Weary Blues was published two years afterwards. Hughes is known for his portrayals of the lives of blacks from the twenties to the sixties. In addition to being a poet, he was a novelist, and writer of short stories and plays. It is ... known that his love of jazz had an influence on his writing as in Montage of a Dream Deferred.
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[W]hat emerges as a chief criticism of the Harlem Renaissance is that while African-American culture became absorbed into the mainstream American culture, a strange separation emerged of the Black community from American culture. As African-Americans with roots in this country dating to beginning of the North American slave trade in the early 17th Century, their worldview is distinctly native. Blacks, unlike other immigrants, had no immediate past, history and culture to celebrate as they were separated by generations from their roots in Africa. But the positive implications of American nativity have never been fully appreciated by them. It seems too simple: the Afro-American's history and culture is American, more completely so than most other ethnic groups within the United States.
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The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance opened doors and deeply influenced the generations of African American writers that followed, including Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks. In the forties, fifties, and sixties, Hayden taught at Fisk University and the University of Michigan and served two terms as the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. Since the publication in 1945 of her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks has combined a quiet life with critical success. Her second book, Annie Allen, won the 1950 Pulitzer prize, the first time a book by a black poet had won that coveted distinction, and the last time until Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah, almost forty years later. Brooks was a virtuoso of technique, her exquisite poems exploring, for the first time, the interior lives of African American individuals. Brooks' perspective shifted mid-career, her later work influenced by the politically and socially radical Black Arts Movement of the sixties.
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The Harlem Renaissance changed forever the dynamics of African American arts and literature in the United States. The writers that followed in the 1930s and 1940s found that publishers and the public were more open to African American literature than they had been at the beginning of the century. Furthermore, the existence of the body of African American literature from the Renaissance inspired writers such as Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright to pursue literary careers in the late 1930s and the 1940s. The outpouring of African American literature of the 1980s and 1990s by such writers as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison ... had its roots in the writing of the Harlem Renaissance. The influence of the Harlem Renaissance was not confined to the United States. Writers McKay, Hughes, and Cullen, actor and musician Paul Robeson, dancer Josephine Baker, and others traveled to Europe and attained a popularity abroad that rivaled or surpassed what they achieved in the United States.
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The influence of the Harlem Renaissance was not confined to the United States. Writers Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen, actor and musician Paul Robeson, dancer Josephine Baker, and others traveled to Europe and attained a popularity abroad that rivaled or surpassed what they achieved in the United States. The founders of the Négritude movement in the French Caribbean traced their ideas directly to the influence of Hughes and McKay. South African writer Peter Abrahams cited his youthful discovery of the anthology The New Negro as the event that turned him toward a career as a writer. For thousands of blacks around the world, the Harlem Renaissance was proof that whites did not hold a monopoly on literature and culture.
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The Harlem Renaissance may best be conceptualized as a group of young writers orbiting somewhat erratically around several older black intellectuals who were established in the NAACP, in the Urban League, or with black journals and universities. These older men and women, while sometimes participating directly in the creative aspects of the Renaissance, served chiefly as critics, advisers, and liaisons between the younger black writers and the white literary establishment. This group, consisting of people such as James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and W.E.B. Du Bois, generally helped lesser-known black writers make contacts with white publishers and potential patrons. As such, they exerted considerable influence and a certain amount of control over aspiring black writers.The black writers of the Harlem Renaissance were in the vanguard of the attempt to come to terms with black urbanization.
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