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Realism [1850-1900]                     PERIOD CHARACTERISTICS

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Realism [1850-1900]                     PERIOD CHARACTERISTICS

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1. Feelings of disillusionment.
2. Common subjects: slums of rapidly growing cities, factories replacing farmlands, poor factory workers, corrupt politicians.
3. Represented the manner and environment of everyday life and ordinary people as realistically as possible (Regionalism).
4. Sought to explain behavior (psychologically/socially).

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Mark Twain
-Huckleberry Finn

Jack London
-Call of the Wild
-"To Build a Fire"

Stephen Crane
-"The Open Boat"

Ambrose Bierce
-"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"

Kate Chopin
-"Story of an Hour"
-The Awakening

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Realism -Fact #1                                                       Mark Twain - Huckleberry Finn          

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Realism -Fact #1                                                       Mark Twain - Huckleberry Finn          

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Huck Finn Was A Real Person

In the town where he grew up, Clemens knew a boy named Tom Blankenship, who was "ignorant, unwashed, [and] insufficiently fed, but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had." He felt for the child, who was poor and neglected by his alcoholic father, and that sentiment stayed with him even in adulthood, after the two lost touch. It's not known for sure what happened to Blankenship, with rumors ranging from trouble with the law to success in it as a justice of the peace, but he most certainly lives on in one of the most successful books in American literature.

Taylor, Grace. “5 Fun Facts about Mark Twain.” History Daily, 13 Dec. 2021, historydaily.org/mark-twain-facts-stories-trivia. Accessed on March 22, 2022.

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Realism - Fact #2 Kate Chopin - "The awakening"

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Realism - Fact #2 Kate Chopin - "The awakening"

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Chopin’s novels were mostly forgotten after her death in 1904, but several of her short stories appeared in an anthology within five years after her death, others were reprinted over the years, and slowly people again came to read her. In the 1930s a Chopin biography appeared which spoke well of her short fiction but dismissed The Awakening as unfortunate. However, by the 1950s scholars and others recognized that the novel is an insightful and moving work of fiction. Such readers set in motion a Kate Chopin revival, one of the more remarkable literary revivals in the United States.

“Biography, Kate Chopin, The Awakening, the Storm, Stories.” KateChopin.org, 12 Oct. 2021, https://www.katechopin.org/biography/.  Accessed on March 22, 2022.

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Faulkner never graduated from high school or earned a college degree, yet he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, two Pulitzer prizes and the National Book Award, twice.

UC San Diego Extension. “Five Facts about William Faulkner.” Five Facts About William Faulkner | UC San Diego Extension, UC San Diego Extension, 20 Aug. 2012, https://extension.ucsd.edu/news-and-events/extension-blog/august-2012/five-facts-about-faulkner. Accessed on March 24, 2022.

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William Faulkner at the University of Virginia

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William Faulkner’s masterpieces are no exception: they are filled with the sights, smells and sounds of the South, and the distinctive frame of mind of its people. Faulkner’s richly imagined Yoknapatawpha County, a fictionalized version of his own Mississippi homeland, is inhabited by a cast of vivid and unforgettable characters that Faulkner drew from his own family’s centuries-long history in the American South.

UC San Diego Extension. “Five Facts about William Faulkner.” Five Facts About William Faulkner | UC San Diego Extension, UC San Diego Extension, 20 Aug. 2012, https://extension.ucsd.edu/news-and-events/extension-blog/august-2012/five-facts-about-faulkner. Accessed on March 24, 2022.

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He wrote two volumes of poetry: The Marble Faun (1924), which is named after a Nathanial Hawthorne novel, and "A Green Bough" (1933), as well as a short story collection of crime-fiction called "Knight's Gambit" (1949).

UC San Diego Extension. “Five Facts about William Faulkner.” Five Facts About William Faulkner | UC San Diego Extension, UC San Diego Extension, 20 Aug. 2012, https://extension.ucsd.edu/news-and-events/extension-blog/august-2012/five-facts-about-faulkner. Accessed on March 24, 2022.

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The House on Mango Street, first published in 1984, won the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award in 1985 and is required reading in middle schools, high schools, and universities across the country. It has sold over six million copies since its initial publication and is still selling strongly.

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She has two foundations for helping emerging writers. In her own words: "I founded both the Macondo Foundation, an association of socially engaged writers, and the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, a grant-giving institution that served Texas writers for fifteen years."

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Cisneros was raised Catholic, but as an adult, she discovered that Buddhism was the best way to embrace her spirituality with her background as a Mexican-American woman: ‘the amazing parts about Buddhism is that it is taking me back to my culture and my family spirituality. Buddhism for me is a way of helping to guide my life work. It focuses on serving humanity’

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Modernism 1900-1950           PERIOD CHARACTERISTICS

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Modernism 1900-1950           PERIOD CHARACTERISTICS

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1. Sense of disillusionment and loss of faith in the "American Dream": the independent, self-reliant, individual will triumph.
2. Emphasis on bold experimentation in style and form over the traditional.
3. Interest in the inner workings of the human mind (ex. Stream of consciousness).

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Lorraine Hansberry
-A Raisin in the Sun

F. Scott Fitzgerald
-The Great Gatsby

William Faulkner
-"A Rose for Emily"

Eudora Welty
-"A Worn Path"

Robert Frost
-poetry

T. S. Eliot
-The Waste Land
-"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

John Steinbeck
-Of Mice and Men
-The Grapes of Wrath

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Modernism Fact # 1 Lorraine Hansberry -A Raisin in the Sun

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Modernism Fact # 1 Lorraine Hansberry -A Raisin in the Sun

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The title for A Raisin in the Sun comes from the poem “Harlem” written by Langston Hughes:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

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Modernism Fact #2 -  F. Scott Fitzgerald kept an extraordinarily detailed record of his life.

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Modernism Fact #2 -  F. Scott Fitzgerald kept an extraordinarily detailed record of his life.

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Between 1919 and 1937, Fitzgerald obsessively recorded the progress of his life and career in a large, leather-bound business ledger. Much of the ledger is dedicated to recording his published works as a writer and his income, but one section, titled “Outline Chart of My Life,” provides a month-by-month account of his activities since birth. Fitzgerald documented everything from his first word (“up”), to his height at age 13 (5’3’), to the date he fell in love with Zelda (September 7, 1918). Many years also include a brief summary sentence. Age 14 is described as “A Year of Much Activity but Dangerous,” while the headline for 1920—the year he first found fame—reads “Revelry and Marriage. The rewards of the year before.”

https://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-f-scott-fitzgerald

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1. He was named after a famous ancestor.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul Minnesota on September 24, 1896. He was named for Francis Scott Key, the lawyer and writer who penned the lyrics to "The Star Spangled Banner" during the War of 1812. The two were only distantly related-Key was a second cousin three times removed-but Fitzgerald was known to play up the family connection. While driving past a statue of Key in an alcoholic haze in 1934, he supposedly hopped from the car and hid in the bushes, yelling to a friend, "Don't let Frank see me drunk!"

2. He was a poor student and an atrocious speller.

Fitzgerald read widely and demonstrated an early talent for writing, but he was a lousy student who struggled to achieve passing marks in both grade school and college. He had a penchant for cutting classes during his time at Princeton University and nearly failed out before abandoning his studies to join the military. Despite his legendary command of the written word, Fitzgerald was also a poor speller and may have suffered from dyslexia. After reading a typo-filled version of "This Side of Paradise," literary critic Edmund Wilson-a classmate of Fitzgerald's during his Princeton days-declared it "one of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published...full of English words misused with the most reckless abandon."

3. He narrowly missed out on serving in World War I.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Fitzgerald dropped out of Princeton and took a commission as a second lieutenant in the army. Worried he might die in battle, he began frantically writing in his off-hours in the hopes of leaving behind a literary legacy. While he never made it to the battlegrounds of World War I-the November 1918 armistice was signed shortly before he was to be shipped overseas-Fitzgerald did complete a draft of an unpublished novel called "The Romantic Egotist," which he later reworked into his smash hit debut "This Side of Paradise."

4. His wife Zelda was considered the quintessential 1920s "flapper."

Shortly after the publication of "This Side of Paradise," Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama judge. Beautiful and unpredictable, Zelda was a major inspiration for the new generation of liberated "flapper" girls Fitzgerald often wrote about in his novels and stories. She smoked and drank in public, cracked risqué jokes and was an accomplished painter, dancer and writer. The couple's fashionable clothes and booze-fueled antics made them the toast of the literary world-writer Ring Lardner even called them "the prince and princess of their generation"-but their glamorous lives were later visited by tragedy in the 1930s. Fitzgerald sank into alcoholism and struggled to write, and Zelda suffered a mental breakdown and spent the latter part of her life in and out of sanitariums.

5. He kept an extraordinarily detailed record of his life.

Between 1919 and 1937, Fitzgerald obsessively recorded the progress of his life and career in a large, leather-bound business ledger. Much of the ledger is dedicated to recording his published works as a writer and his income, but one section, titled "Outline Chart of My Life," provides a month-by-month account of his activities since birth. Fitzgerald documented everything from his first word ("up"), to his height at age 13 (5'3'), to the date he fell in love with Zelda (September 7, 1918). Many years also include a brief summary sentence. Age 14 is described as "A Year of Much Activity but Dangerous," while the headline for 1920-the year he first found fame-reads "Revelry and Marriage. The rewards of the year before."

6. He never lived in the same place for more than a few years.

Despite earning a small fortune as a writer, Fitzgerald never owned a home and spent most of his life living out of rented houses, apartments and high-class hotels. Between 1920 and 1940, he lived variously in New York City, Connecticut, Minnesota, Long Island, Paris, the French Riviera, Rome, Los Angeles, Delaware, Switzerland, Baltimore and North Carolina. Fitzgerald's itinerant nature was due in part to his attempts to escape his hard-partying lifestyle and find peace and quiet to write, but he also occasionally moved to cities where his mentally ill wife Zelda was being hospitalized.

7. He had a rocky friendship with Ernest Hemingway.

The macho Hemingway and the urbane Fitzgerald might seem like an odd pairing, but the two authors struck up a fast friendship after meeting in Paris in 1925. Their relationship was complicated by Hemingway's intense dislike of Zelda Fitzgerald, whom he described as "crazy" and a distraction to her husband's writing. The literary titans drifted apart during the late-1920s, and Hemingway later bashed Fitzgerald in print on more than one occasion. By 1937, Fitzgerald lamented that their friendship was as good as finished. "I talk with the authority of failure," he wrote. "Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the table again."

8. His most famous work was considered a flop upon its release.

Despite winning rave reviews from the likes of T.S. Eliot and Edith Wharton, Fitzgerald's 1925 masterpiece "The Great Gatsby" was never a bestseller in his lifetime. It performed poorly compared to his first two novels, selling just over 20,000 copies and only turning a meager profit for its publisher. Popular interest in the book didn't spike until World War II when some 150,000 copies were shipped to U.S. servicemen overseas. Combined with other posthumous re-releases of his work, this "Armed Services Edition" helped revive Fitzgerald's literary reputation and secure "The Great Gatsby" a place among the most beloved American novels. The book now sells some 500,000 copies each year.

9. He worked as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Following a series of career setbacks and repeated attempts to quit drinking, Fitzgerald moved to Los Angeles in 1937 and took a job as a screenwriter with the film studio MGM. He spent over two years working as an uncredited script doctor on such films as "Gone with the Wind" and "A Yank at Oxford," but his own scripts-including proposed projects for Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford-were almost universally rejected. In the end, the famous novelist achieved just one Hollywood credit for writing on a 1938 film called "Three Comrades." "I just couldn't make the grade as a hack," Fitzgerald quipped after one of his studio contracts was terminated. "That, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence."

10. He died before finishing his final novel.

In 1940, Fitzgerald began writing "The Love of the Last Tycoon," a novel inspired by his experiences working in the trenches of Hollywood. He was in debt and still struggling to remain sober, but he believed his work-in-progress showed considerable promise. "It will, at any rate, be nothing like anything else as I'm digging it out of myself like uranium," he wrote to Zelda in November. Only a month later, Fitzgerald suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 44, leaving his comeback novel incomplete. A version of "The Love of the Last Tycoon" was published a year later, however, and even though the book was only half-finished, many critics hailed it as Fitzgerald's most accomplished work.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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10 Things You May Not Know About F. Scott Fitzgerald | HISTORY

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Explore 10 surprising facts about the glamorous and tragic life of one of the 20th century's most celebrated writers.

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People boycotted the prohibition → The most unpopular and disregarded the law of the era, it was so disliked that an estimated 80% of U.S. Senators, Congressmen, and high government officials – including the three U.S. presidents of the era – imbibed10 the banned alcohol.

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Red Scare was at a high during → the idea that labor unrest was being fostered by communist radicals, immigrants were the main target because Americans thought them to be communists as well. Immigrants took jobs belonging to Americans and they thought them to be political radicals with more than 800.000 new immigrants, which cause the government to enforce immigration laws.

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The American Dream during the 30s and 40s: The Epic of America by James Truslow Adams.

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The American Dream during the 30s and 40s: The Epic of America by James Truslow Adams.

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Adams is interested in the whole of American history, how it began, and what it represented in the first half of the twentieth century. He traces the historical origins of the American concept of "bigger and better," attitudes toward business, the American Dream, and other characteristics generally considered "typically American." Ever since America became an independent nation, each generation has seen an uprising of its citizens to save the American Dream from forces seeking to overwhelm and dispel it.

https://franklin.library.upenn.edu/catalog/FRANKLIN_9913984573503681#:~:text=The%20Epic%20of%20America%20paints,outlook%2C%20character%2C%20and%20opinion.

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The American Dream during the 30s and 40s:  Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s(FDR’s) 

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The American Dream during the 30s and 40s:  Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s(FDR’s) 

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The president's New Deal programs promised safe, healthy futures for every American—a new understanding of the American Dream.  The American Dream transformed into an ideal that relied on people being able to afford all the modern accessories: cars, television sets, and college educations for one’s children. Television greatly helped define the American Dream as the acquisition of material goods. Americans dreamed of living ideal lives like those portrayed in shows such as Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best. Many Americans fueled their purchase of the new American Dream with credit cards, a choice that eventually affected the state of the American Dream.

https://wjccschools.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/05/How-the-American-Dream-Has-Changed-Over-Time.pdf

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World War II ended, Americans turned their attention to their families and jobs. The economy prospered. By the end of the decade Americans were enjoying the highest standard of living in the world.

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Most people in this era wanted to be a lawyer, a doctor, or work for the government. Usually women didn't work if they could afford it, instead they were housewives.

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Harlem Renaissance (1920–1940)                                                    PERIOD CHARACTERISTICS

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Harlem Renaissance (1920–1940)                                                    PERIOD CHARACTERISTICS

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1.Black cultural movement in Harlem, New York
2.Some poetry rhythms based on spirituals and jazz, lyrics on the blues, and diction from the street talk of the ghettos
3. Other poetry used conventional lyrical forms

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James Weldon Johnson
-The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Claude McKay
-If We Must Die

Countee Cullen
-Color

Langston Hughes (poetry)

Zora Neale Hurston
-Their Eyes Were Watching God

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In 1896, Johnson began to study law in Thomas Ledwith’s law office in Jacksonville, Florida. In 1898, Ledwith considered Johnson ready to take the Florida bar exam. After a grueling two-hour exam, Johnson was given a pass and admitted to the bar. One examiner expressed his anguish by bolting from the room and stating, “Well, I can’t forget he’s a nigger; and I’ll be damned if I’ll stay here to see him admitted.” In 1898, Johnson became one of only a handful of black attorneys in the state.

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/johnson-james-weldon-1871-1938/#:~:text=Johnson%20was%20a%20member%20of,protest%20racial%20violence%20and%20lynching.

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Public Domain Image

James Weldon Johnson, composer, diplomat, social critic, and civil rights activist, was born of Bahamian immigrant parents in Jacksonville, Florida on June 17, 1871. Instilled with the value of education by his father James, a waiter, and his mother Helen, a teacher, Johnson excelled at the Stanton School in Jacksonville. In 1889, he entered Atlanta University in Georgia, graduating in 1894.

In 1896, Johnson began to study law in Thomas Ledwith's law office in Jacksonville, Florida. In 1898, Ledwith considered Johnson ready to take the Florida bar exam. After a grueling two-hour exam, Johnson was given a pass and admitted to the bar. One examiner expressed his anguish by bolting from the room and stating, "Well, I can't forget he's a nigger; and I'll be damned if I'll stay here to see him admitted." In 1898, Johnson became one of only a handful of black attorneys in the state.

Johnson, however, did not practice law. Instead, he became principal at the Stanton School in Jacksonville, where he improved the curriculum and also added the ninth and tenth grades. Johnson also started the first black newspaper, the Daily American, in Jacksonville. With his brother Rosamond, who had been trained at the New England Conservatory of Music in Massachusetts, Johnson's interests turned to songwriting for Broadway.

Rosamond and James migrated to New York in 1902 and were soon earning over twelve thousand dollars a year by selling their songs to Broadway performers. Upon a return trip to Florida in 1900, the brothers were asked to write a celebratory song in honor of Abraham Lincoln's birthday. The product, a poem set to music, became "Lift Every Voice and Sing," now known as the Black National Anthem.

In 1906, Johnson became United States consul to Puerto Cabello in Venezuela. While in the foreign service, he met his future wife, Grace Nail, the daughter of influential black New York City real estate speculator, John E. Nail. The couple's first year was spent in Corinto, Nicaragua, Johnson's diplomatic post.

While in the diplomatic service, Johnson had begun to write his most famous literary work, The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man. This novel, published in 1912, became a work of note during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. In 1914, Johnson became an editor for the New York Age. He soon gained notoriety when W.E.B. DuBois published Johnson's critique of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) publication The Crisis. Johnson was a member of Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity and Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity.

In 1916, Johnson became Field Secretary for the NAACP and dramatically increased NAACP membership and the number of branches. In 1917, he organized the famous "Silent March" down 5th Avenue to protest racial violence and lynching. The march, which numbered approximately ten thousand participants, was the largest protest organized by African Americans to that point. Johnson's participation in the campaign against lynching continued for the next two decades.

Although he was a nationally recognized civil rights leader, Johnson continued to write and critique poetry in a column for the New York Age. His "Poetry Corner" column, published in 1922 as The Book of American Negro Poetry, became an important contribution to the emerging Harlem Renaissance particularly because of its inclusion of Claude McKay's "If We Must Die." Johnson's other Harlem Renaissance contributions included The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), God's Trombones (1927), and Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927).

In 1930, Johnson published Black Manhattan, a Social History of Black New York, and three years later (in 1933) his autobiography, Along This Way, appeared.

Johnson resigned from the NAACP in 1930 and accepted a faculty position in creative writing and literature at Fisk University. He maintained an active life in teaching and public speaking until he died in an automobile accident on June 26, 1938, while vacationing in Wiscasset, Maine. He was 67 at the time of his death.

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James Weldon Johnson, composer, diplomat, social critic, and civil rights activist, was born of Bahamian immigrant parents in Jacksonville, Florida on June 17, 1871. Instilled with the value of education by his father James, a waiter, and his mother Helen, a teacher, Johnson excelled at ...

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He was also one of the first artists to write jazz poetry. “His first volume of poetry is called ‘The Weary Blues’ in 1926. Here he is integrating jazz and blues rhythms, subjects, themes into poetry.

https://blog-college.ku.edu/9-things-you-should-know-about-langston-hughes

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Famed writer and one-time Lawrence resident Langston Hughes, born in Joplin, Mo., is celebrated throughout the University of Kansas and the city. To help us celebrate his birthday and kick off Black History Month, we spoke to professors across campus to tell us what we should know about Hughes’ significant and broad career and the lasting impact his work had on American culture … in a nutshell.

He grew up in Lawrence, Kansas

Not Without Laughter, 1930. Image courtesy of the Kenneth Spencer Research Library

Though born in Missouri, Langston Hughes moved to Lawrence to live with his grandmother Mary Langston. Hughes primarily lived with his grandmother during his early childhood while his mother moved about seeking jobs.

“Hughes spent his formative years in Lawrence. He learned many of his values from his grandmother, which are revealed in his various forms of writing,” said Edgar Tidwell, professor of English.  A number of autobiographical moments from his time in Lawrence appear especially in Hughes’s novel “Not Without Laughter,” Tidwell said.

He was a major leader of the Harlem Renaissance

“When you think of the Harlem Renaissance, people often think of that as the 1920s in Harlem, New York City, and that’s natural; that’s where it started,” said Evans who has been teaching Reading and Writing the Harlem Renaissance (ENGL 105) for about five years.

Hughes himself defined the Harlem Renaissance in this narrow sense. However, “in 1925, Alain Locke in his introduction to an anthology called ‘The New Negro’, predicted an ongoing kind of renaissance of black literature and the arts that he envisioned as having no end but as continuously evolving,” Evans said. “Ironically, Hughes proves Dr. Locke right because he and Zora Neale Hurston both had long careers that extended far beyond the 1920s in Harlem.”

He was a poet of the people

“His life’s work was about bringing people together socially, politically and artistically,” said Shawn Alexander, director of the Langston Hughes Center at KU and associate professor of African and African-American studies. “At the same time, in his attempts to bring people together he challenged the nation to live up to its ideals, as seen in two of his most famous poems, ‘I, too, sing America’ and ‘Montage of a Dream Deferred.’”

He was also one of the first artists to write jazz poetry. “His first volume of poetry is called ‘The Weary Blues’ in 1926. Here he is integrating jazz and blues rhythms, subjects, themes into poetry. He is experimenting with this,” Evans said.

He was more than just a poet; he was a writer in almost any genre you can think of

“Hughes is known mainly as a poet but he wrote in many forms and genres, including poetry, short story, drama, the novel, autobiography, journalistic prose, song lyrics and history,” Alexander said. “For instance, in 1962 he published the first comprehensive history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, entitled, ‘Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP.’”

Throughout his career, Hughes wrote 16 collections of poetry, 12 novels and short story collections, 11 major plays, eight books for children, seven works of non-fiction, and numerous essays.

“A very prolific writer in almost any genre you can think of. And his career of course, spanned decades.  His career ended when he died in 1967. He was active until the last,” Evans said.

He was rebellious, breaking from the black literary establishment

“[Hughes’s] 1926 essay ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’ turned out to be something of a manifesto for the young black American writers and artists. And in this Hughes articulates for the first time a kind of racial consciousness and cultural nationalism. In other words Hughes is breaking with the establishment here in that he is asking the younger writers and artists to take pride in their blackness and their black heritage. And to make that an informing source for their art,” Evans said. “Hughes is, above all, what you might call a poet of the people in that he writes his poetry and fiction in a way that makes it accessible to just about everybody. You don’t have to have a college degree; you don’t have to have a background in Greek mythology to get what he’s going for.  The themes he’s dealing with are the themes of every day black American life. I would say this is his lasting contribution in that he helped to create an environment that influenced two or three generations of writers.”

He was a world traveler

“He was more than just an African American. He was much more than an American. He was a man of the world,” Tidwell said. “A lot of people are not aware of or tend not to pay much attention to the fact that Langston Hughes was a world traveler.”

His autobiographies “The Big Sea” (1940) and “I Wonder as I Wander” (1956) are admirable records of his travels throughout the United States, Europe, Africa, Russia and East Asia. He embraced the international flavor of people and their spirit of community, Tidwell said. People naturally gravitated to his warm personality, and it was said he never met a stranger.

He had a complicated relationship with his mother

“His mother was largely in and out of his life,” Tidwell said. “But she was a very complex woman.”

Tidwell co-edited the book “My Dear Boy: Carrie Hughes’s Letters to Langston Hughes, 1926-1938,” which explores Hughes’ relationship with his mother through letters she sent to him during the last years of her life. While working on the book, Tidwell said he “began to learn how truly complicated Hughes’ family relationships were. It was an opportunity to see what life was like for them through the eyes of his mother. He didn’t always respond to his mother by return mail; instead, he often used his writing to take up themes that appeared in her correspondence to him.”

He worked with the father of Black History

“A brief but often neglected connection occurred when Hughes came back to the U.S. from a tour abroad.   He stayed in Washington, D.C., and spent some time working for historian Dr. Carter G. Woodson,” Tidwell said.

The First Book of Jazz, illustrated by Cliff Roberts, 1955. Image courtesy of the Kenneth Spencer Research Library

Hughes helped Woodson catalog new and noteworthy experiences and achievements of African Americans. These achievements were celebrated in Negro History Week, which Dr. Woodson inaugurated in February 1926 between the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. In 1976 the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History (ASALH) and President Gerald Ford expanded the commemoration to the entire month. For his own pioneering scholarship, Dr. Woodson earned the designation of “the father of Black History.”

His legacy lives on at KU

“Hughes’ legacy lives in numerous ways at KU, but the most obvious example is with the Langston Hughes Center,” Alexander said.

As part of the Department African and African-American Studies, the Langston Hughes Center (LHC) serves as an academic research and educational center that builds upon the legacy and insight of Langston Hughes. It coordinates and develops teaching, research and outreach activities in African-American Studies, and the study of race and culture in American society at KU and throughout the Midwest. Since the LHC’s revival in 2008 it has held four major symposiums and sponsored nearly 80 academic talks and programs.

KU has also sponsored the Langston Hughes Visiting Professorship since 1977. This program attracts prominent ethnic minority scholars to the campus in a broad range of disciplines. The Langston Hughes Professor teaches two courses a semester and delivers a campus-wide symposium. Additionally, several past recipients are now tenured faculty members at KU.

Cover photo courtesy of the Langston Hughes Center.

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9 things you should know about Langston Hughes

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Famed writer and one-time Lawrence resident Langston Hughes, born in Joplin, Mo., is celebrated throughout the University of Kansas and the city. To help us celebrate his birthday and kick off Black H

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African Americans once struggled to achieve the Dream thanks to bias and discrimination. However, it has opened up to them thanks to the civil rights movement of the 60s, which culminated with the March on Washington. During the protests Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I Have A Dream" speech where he spoke of an America where everyone is equal; a place where everyone can achieve the American Dream.

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Americans were largely unaware of the damage humans were dealing to the environment, until Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962. The non-fiction bestseller revealed the damage that pesticides such as DDT were having on the environment. Shocked and outraged by Carson's revelations, the public demanded immediate change. People did not want to live in a future where it was unsafe to live. Thus, a new aspect of the American Dream was born. From this new aspect came the Environmental Protection Agency (1970)

https://sites.google.com/site/ushistory1960stoday/home/american-dream

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Fact #1: The American Dream during the 80’s

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Fact #1: The American Dream during the 80’s

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When 1980s rolled around, the “American Dream” was seen extensively in advertisements for home builders to directly tie the idea of buying or building a house to the vision of the country and what it meant to be a true citizen.

https://www.rd.com/list/how-the-american-dream-has-changed/

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Fact #2 The American Dream during the 80’s 

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Fact #2 The American Dream during the 80’s 

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In the 1980 the internet was created, and the creation of the internet is one of the biggest reasons why the American dream might be seen differently today.

https://www.bartleby.com/essay/The-American-Dream-In-The-1980s-PJ9ZFM8K8DT

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Fact #1 The American Dream during the 90's and early 2000's

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Fact #1 The American Dream during the 90's and early 2000's

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In 1999 about one-third believed the American Dream meant some form of financial success: the acquisition of goods, a bigger house, a home with a piece of land around it and so on.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-12839437

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Fact #2 The American Dream during the 90's and early 2000's

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Fact #2 The American Dream during the 90's and early 2000's

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Once the 1990s hit, technology began to influence the American dream heavily. People started craving their own personal computers, cell phones, televisions (for each room), and video games. By the 2000s, this started to take a turn, especially during the first half of the decade.

https://www.rd.com/list/how-the-american-dream-has-changed/

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1. Influenced by studies of media, language, and information technology.
2. Sense that little is unique; culture endlessly duplicates itself.
3. New literary forms and techniques: works composed of only dialogue, or combining fiction and nonfiction, experimenting with physical appearance of their work

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Alice Walker

Wallace Stevens

e.e. cummings

Maya Angelou

Anne Sexton

James Baldwin

Richard Wright

Sandra Cisneros

Amy Tan

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When Alice Walker was eight years old, she was accidentally shot in the eye with her brother’s BB gun. Scar tissue proceeded to grow over her eye and Walker retreated to more solitary activities, such as writing. When she was 14 the scar tissue was removed, but Walker never regained function of her eye.

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In 1965, Anne Sexton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London. She then went on to win the 1967 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third collection, Live or Die(Houghton Mifflin, 1966). In total, Sexton published nine volumes of poetry during her lifetime, including Love Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 1969), The Book of Folly (Houghton Mifflin, 1973) and The Awful Rowing Toward God (Houghton Mifflin, 9175).
https://poets.org/poet/anne-sexton

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I read The Help a while ago which tells the story of the maids of a white suburb in Jackson Mississipi. They give their personal accounts of the terrible treatment they received during the 1960s white southern segregation that they were part of as workers, told from their personal perspective. It is a heartbreaking story, but I really like reading about anything related to Human Rights, Racism, and Women issues.

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First of all, I have to say that I think that Padlet made things easier for me to organize and have a visual summary of every time period of American Literature. The timeline is an easy and simplified way to take a look at the authors that we have study in depth during the course like Ralph Waldo Emerson or F. Scott Fitzgerald, but it also alows me to delve into other characters that are relevant, but the class didn't get much information about. I also think that the historical context plays an important role in the literature of the time, so being able to understand the social and economic issues of the time creates a better picure to comprehend the authors' wold view.