Zora Neale Hurston and James Langston Hughes - Essay Example

http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/spec/manuscript/hurston/hurston.htm This site contains listings of available documents on Hurston's Correspondence, Manuscripts, Biographical and Critical Papers, Reference Material and Photographs, Medals and Tapes.Access to the documents require a registration with the Special Collections Access Serviceshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zora_Neale_Hurston The Wikipedia page on Zora Neale Hurston contains extensive material on the author's background and career, politics, public obscurity and acclaim.

"In 1925, shortly before entering Barnard, Hurston became one of the leaders of the literary renaissance happening in Harlem, producing the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! along with Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman. This literary movement became the center of the Harlem Renaissance" (Wikipedia). The section on politics contains insightful material regarding Hurston's beliefs and convictions on libertarianism, religion, feminist individualism and segregation.http://www.zoranealehurston.

com/ The official Zora Neale Hurston website by the Estate of Zora Neale Hurston and HarperCollins contains Hurston's biography and chronology among others. The site describes Hurston as "one of the pre-eminent writers of twentieth-century African-American literature". A link to http://www.zoranealehurston.ucf.edu/ provides a lengthy biography written by Anna Lillios.http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/mainHTML.cfmpage=Kaplan.html The Zora Neale Hurston page contains an interview with Carla Kaplan, editor of Zora Neale Hurston: Life in Letters. . blic office, in 1855.

" The site contains direct quotes from Hughes' works which define his convictions, '"We younger Negro artists now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame."' '"I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street. (these songs) had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going."' http://myhero.com/poets/hughes.asp A page by Jeff Trussel containing Trussel's appreciation of Langston Hughes as a "fiercely poetic" Black American who "wanted his audience to taste the whole of the African-American experience".

Trussel believes that "With the advent of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, the relatively genteel world of American poetry was shaken to its foundations. Strong black voices broke out all over the country. Of this remarkable creative outpouring, one voice rose among all of the rest. This was the voice of poet Langston Hughes." The link to http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/84mbk9qw9780252064746.html provides previews to Hughes' essays and a description of the work where Hughes "as a columnist for the famous African-American newspaper the Chicago Defender chronicled the hopes and despair of his people.

For twenty years, he wrote forcefully about international race relations, Jim Crow, the South, white supremacy, imperialism and fascism, segregation in the armed forces, the Soviet Union and communism, and African-American art and culture. None of the racial hypocrisies of American life escaped his searing, ironic prose." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langston_Hughes The Wikipedia page on Langston Hughes contains lengthy material on the writer's life, career and political views. It includes interesting notes on Hughes' relationship with his father, '"I had been thinking about my father