These quotes from Langston Hughes are a tribute to mark the 40 year anniversary of his passing. Although I did not discover the writings of Mr. Hughes until the late 1960’s, I especially like his series of books about Jesse B. Semple, often called Simple, published in the 1950’s. This lead to finding and reading ...
Poetry is like music. When you read it, empty your mind, forget about every thing and enjoy it. When you write it, tell a story, paint a picture and excite the reader’s emotions. Let the reader feel something, let it be like a song that brings the listener to tears or makes the listener laugh. ...
Tennessee Williams uses a variety of techniques to reveal to us the character of Laura in The Glass Menagerie. We are introduced to Laura as she is seated at a “delicate ivory chair” (137), polishing her collection of glass objects. Before any dialogue is spoken, we are presented with two images of fragility, the chair ...
Beneatha Younger, one of the few characters presented in Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun, possesses a mentality unique from any other character: she hungers for intellectualism and thirsts for individuality. Her struggles to attain these desired traits embody the hardships that ambitious women – real or fictional – have also faced. Beneatha ...
Tragedy has changed considerably since it was created by the ancient Greek dramatists. In The Poetics Aristotle essentially lay down a groundwork of rules for writing what he had come to view as the ideal tragedy; at the same time he give indications of how a less than ideal tragedy might be conceived. Several factors ...
Lorraine Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun” was far ahead of its time in both depicting the everyday life of black people in a way that everyone can understand and discuss the oppression that black people still felt even though strides had been taken towards civil rights. According to NPR, Hansberry shared the aims ...
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” (King).In his poems, “Dream Deferred,” “Dreams” and “As I Grew Older,” Langston Hughes (1902-1967) considers the importance of dreams. Although ...
Ms. Sanaa Lathan was born in 1971 in New York City. Her name (pronounced Sa-na) is Swahili for “work of art” or “beauty.” The daughter of director Stan Lathan and Broadway actress-dancer Eleanor McCoy, Sanaa was destined to be in the business. Sanaa also took dance and gymnastics lessons to add a little diversity to ...
