Richard Wrights Assessment for the Negro Writers Essay

Richard Wrights Assessment for the Negro Writers Introduction Richard Wright’s plead in the Blueprint for Negro Writing could be very well summarized in one of the famous words from Thomas Kempis, â€Å"Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.† In this popular essay, Richard Wright denounced the Negro writers as he perceived them to be merely begging for the sympathy of the bourgeoisie instead of striving to present a life that is more worth living for the Black Americans (Mitchell 98). This paper argues that Richard Wright was justified in his assessment that literature was so concentrated on pandering to white readers thereby neglecting the needs of the â€Å"Negro†¦show more content†¦The Harlem Renaissance Firstly, it is worthwhile to examine the time when both of these literary works were written. The writers studied in this paper are part of the Harlem renaissance, the period of rebirth of the African American creative expression. During this time, the time of so-called â€Å"New Negro,† the African American communities more likely developed a sense of Negro pride (Rasche 5). In addition, the Harlem Renaissance writers attempted to relate their history to their present condition, as well the urban and rural experience of the African Americans. Thus, writing was the product of and their respond to their historical and cultural context (Rasche 6). On Langston Hughes and his poem â€Å"The Negro Speaks of Rivers† One of the Harlem Renaissance writer was Langston Hughes (1902-1967). He was an American poet who was at the same time a social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was also one of the pioneers of the literature art form jazz poetry. Hughes’ began to write poems when he was still in his eighth grade. Particularly, he wrote â€Å"The Negro Speaks of Rivers† when he was passing by the Mississippi River, on board on a train down to Mexico with his father (Shmoop 4). Hughes was a key icon during the Harlem Renaissance because his works has helped the black arts and culture flourish in the 1920s. Hughes’ writing reflected his advocacy that â€Å"Black isShow MoreRelatedSlavery and Black Thunder8056 Words   |  33 Pagesnineteenth century Gabriel Insurrection, in Virginia. The novel, which chronicles the Gabriel Prosser-led rebellion against the slave owners of Henrico County, was generally lauded by critics as one of the most significant black American works of fiction. Richard Wright praised the work for dealing forthrightly with the historical and revolutionary traditions of African Americans. Gabriel, a slave convinced that anything â€Å"equal to a grey squirrel wants to be free,† urges other slaves to revolt against theirRead More Visions of The Primitive in Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea Essay examples6201 Words   |  25 Pagesvariant of the more general aesthetic experiments of modernism, especially its obsession with exploring so-called â€Å"primitive† cultures, of which Conrad’s tale is a famously ambiguous example. Moreover, The Big Sea provides a trenchant commentary on writers such as Carl Van Vechten, whose novel Nigger Heaven (1926) promoted the associations of Harlem as an atavistic enclave for a disenfranchised black population.1 Indeed, Hugh M. Gloster describes Nigger Heaven as â€Å"a sort of guide book for visitors who