Among the most influential poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes is perhaps best remembered for the innovative use of jazz rhythms in his writing. While his poetry and essays received much public acclaim and scholarly attention, Hughes' dramas are relatively unknown. Only five of the sixty-three plays Hughes scripted alone or collaboratively have been published (in 1963). Published here, for the first time, are four of Hughes' most poignant, poetic, and political dramas, Scottsboro Limited, Harvest (also known as Blood on the Fields), Angelo Herndon Jones, and De Organizer. Each play reflects Hughes' remarkable professionalism as a playwright as well as his desire to dramatize the social history of the African American experience, especially in the context of the labor movements of the 1930s and their attempts to attract African American workers. Hughes himself counted prominent members of these leftist groups among his close friends and patrons; he formed a theater group with Whittaker Chambers, prompting an FBI investigation of Hughes and his writing in the 1930s. These plays, while easily read as idealistic propaganda pieces for the left, are nonetheless reflective of Hughes' other more influential and studied works. The first scholar to offer a systematic study of Hughes' plays, Susan Duffy provides an informed introduction as well as a detailed analysis of each of the four plays. Each chapter begins with locating the play at a moment in the social history of the 1930s. Then Duffy analyzes the rhetorical strategies employed throughout the script, focusing on the political ideologies attacked as well as the ideologies endorsed. Duffy also establishes that De Organizer,a collaboration with noted jazz pianist and composer James P. Johnson (who also wrote its score) was indeed performed by the Labor Stage. Throughout the analysis of Scottsboro Limited, Harvest, Angelo Herndon Jones, and De Organizer, Duffy returns to the questions of Hughes' motives for writing these works: Were they merely didactic plays attempting to please Hughes' leftist patrons or heartfelt leftist political propaganda? By making these forgotten texts available, and by presenting them within a scholarly discussion of 1930s leftist political movements, Duffy seeks to spark a renewed interest in Langston Hughes as an American playwright and political figure.

Among the most influential poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes is perhaps best remembered for the innovative use of jazz rhythms in his writing. While his poetry and essays received much public acclaim and scholarly attention, Hughes' dramas are relatively unknown. Only five of the sixty-three plays Hughes scripted alone or collaboratively have been published (in 1963). Published here, for the first time, are four of Hughes' most poignant, poetic, and political dramas, Scottsboro Limited, Harvest (also known as Blood on the Fields), Angelo Herndon Jones, and De Organizer. Each play reflects Hughes' remarkable professionalism as a playwright as well as his desire to dramatize the social history of the African American experience, especially in the context of the labor movements of the 1930s and their attempts to attract African American workers. Hughes himself counted prominent members of these leftist groups among his close friends and patrons; he formed a theater group with Whittaker Chambers, prompting an FBI investigation of Hughes and his writing in the 1930s. These plays, while easily read as idealistic propaganda pieces for the left, are nonetheless reflective of Hughes' other more influential and studied works. The first scholar to offer a systematic study of Hughes' plays, Susan Duffy provides an informed introduction as well as a detailed analysis of each of the four plays. Duffy also establishes that De Organizer, a collaboration with noted jazz pianist and composer James P. Johnson (who also wrote its score) was indeed performed by the Labor Stage. By making these forgotten texts available, and by presenting them within a scholarly discussion of 1930s leftist political movements, Duffy seeks to spark a renewed interest in Langston Hughes as an American playwright and political figure.

(Applause Books). Warning: The plays of Political Stages do not make for a quiet evening of theatre. These are the plays which got audiences out of their seats, and sometimes out into the streets. Their words and ideas rumbled ominously down the marble hallways of legislatures and challenged, even threatened, and often changed, the thinking of millions. These are the plays which either lit or reflected the fires of those political controversies which blazed across the American Twentieth Century. Individually, each is a molotov cocktail tossed onto the stage, each a political movement encapsulated in dramatic form. Combined, they constitute both a conflagration and a record of American political and theatrical ideology. Never before, however, have they been collected in one explosive volume. In Political Stages , they have at last been preserved, ever ready to serve at the barricades of subsequent eras. Includes works by Tennessee Williams, Emily Mann, Clifford Odets, Langston Hughes, and others.

The Decades of Modern American Drama series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1930s to 2009 in eight volumes. Each volume equips readers with a detailed understanding of the context from which work emerged: an introduction considers life in the decade with a focus on domestic life and conditions, social changes, culture, media, technology, industry and political events; while a chapter on the theatre of the decade offers a wide-ranging and thorough survey of theatres, companies, dramatists, new movements and developments in response to the economic and political conditions of the day. The work of the four most prominent playwrights from the decade receives in-depth analysis and re-evaluation by a team of experts, together with commentary on their subsequent work and legacy. A final section brings together original documents such as interviews with the playwrights and with directors, drafts of play scenes, and other previously unpublished material. The major playwrights and their works to receive in-depth coverage in this volume include: * Clifford Odets: Waiting for Lefty (1935), Awake and Sing! (1935) and Golden Boy (1937); * Lillian Hellman: The Children's Hour (1934), The Little Foxes (1939), and Days to Come (1936); * Langston Hughes: Mulatto (1935), Mule Bone (1930, with Zora Neale Hurston) and Little Ham (1936); * Gertrude Stein: Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938), Four Saints in Three Acts (written in 1927, published in 1932) and Listen to Me (1936).

Langston Hughes was one of the most important American writers of his generation, and one of the most versatile, producing poetry, fiction, drama, and autobiography. In this innovative study, R. Baxter Miller explores Hughes's life and art to enlarge our appreciation of his contribution to American letters. Arguing that readers often miss the complexity of Hughes's work because of its seeming accessibility, Miller begins with a discussion of the writer's auto-biography, an important yet hitherto neglected key to his imagination. Moving on to consider the subtle resonances of his life in the varied genres over which his imagination "wandered," Miller finds a constant symbiotic bond between the historical and the lyrical. The range of Hughes's artistic vision is revealed in his depiction of Black women, his political stance, his lyric and tragi-comic modes. This is one of the first studies to apply recent methods of literary analysis, including formalist, structuralist, and semiotic criticism, to the work of a Black American writer. Miller not only affirms in Hughes's work the peculiar qualities of Black American culture but provides a unifying conception of his art and identifies the primary metaphors lying at its heart. Here is a fresh and coherent reading of the work of one of the twentieth century's greatest voices, a reinterpretation that renews our appreciation not only of Black American text and heritage but of the literary imagination itself.

Offers advice on writing essays about the works of Langston Hughes and lists sample topics.

Winner of the 2018 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in Textual Studies, presented by the American Academy of Religion 2018 Outstanding Academic Title, given by Choice Magazine A new perspective on the role of religion in the work of Langston Hughes Langston's Salvation offers a fascinating exploration into the religious thought of Langston Hughes. Known for his poetry, plays, and social activism, the importance of religion in Hughes’ work has historically been ignored or dismissed. This book puts this aspect of Hughes work front and center, placing it into the wider context of twentieth-century American and African American religious cultures. Best brings to life the religious orientation of Hughes work, illuminating how this powerful figure helped to expand the definition of African American religion during this time. Best argues that contrary to popular perception, Hughes was neither an avowed atheist nor unconcerned with religious matters. He demonstrates that Hughes’ religious writing helps to situate him and other black writers as important participants in a broader national discussion about race and religion in America. Through a rigorous analysis that includes attention to Hughes’s unpublished religious poems, Langston’s Salvation reveals new insights into Hughes’s body of work, and demonstrates that while Hughes is seen as one of the most important voices of the Harlem Renaissance, his writing also needs to be understood within the context of twentieth-century American religious liberalism and of the larger modernist movement. Combining historical and literary analyses with biographical explorations of Langston Hughes as a writer and individual, Langston’s Salvation opens a space to read Langston Hughes’ writing religiously, in order to fully understand the writer and the world he inhabited.