The/I Wonder as I Wander Big Sea (Masterplots II: African American Literature Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Langston Hughes
- First Published: 1940
- Type of Work: Autobiography
- Time of Work: 1902–1938
- Setting: The United States, Mexico, Africa, France, Haiti, the Soviet Union, and Spain
- Principal Characters: Langston Hughes, Mary Sampson Langston, James Nathaniel Hughes, Carrie Langston Hughes, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Van Vechten, The Anonymous Patron, Noel Sullivan
- Genres: Nonfiction, Autobiography
- Subjects: African Americans, Discrimination, Memory, Racism, Authors or writers, Harlem Renaissance, Manners or customs, Poetry or poets, Social life, Writing
- Locales: Africa, France, United States, Haiti, Mexico, Soviet Union, Spain
Form and Content
Langston Hughes began his writing career in Lincoln, Illinois, when, as the poet of his eighth grade class, he delivered a sixteen-stanza poem for a graduation exercise in 1916. He was elected class poet, he writes in The Big Sea, because no one in his class looked like a poet, or had ever written a poem; his white classmates, knowing that poetry had to have rhythm, elected him, since they believed that all blacks had rhythm. Thus Hughes began a writing career that continued for nearly half a century.
The two autobiographies, The Big Sea...
[The entire page is 2496 words long]
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