John Mercer Langston

Freedom Freedom is a word that can be defined in many ways to different minds, but in literary terms freedom means “the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved”. Two great poets by the name of Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes wrote two extraordinary poems called “I know why the caged bird sings” and “Democracy”. These two poems open your eye to the word freedom. I choose these two poems because, me personally being of Haitian decent I see how my people are treated and thought of. We think we leave Haiti to be free by coming to America but are we really free in America. I plan to further describe these to poems by analyzing what critics say about both the author and the poem and form my own opinion. James…

Love and Care: A Literary Analysis of Roger in “Thank You Ma’m” Everyone in the world has someone to love or is loved by a person. Those people are most often family members. More specifically, mothers and fathers. Roger, a troubled teen in “Thank You Ma’m” written by Langston Hughes does not that that loving person, and without that guidance in his life he tries to steal Mrs. Jones’s purse, an innocent victim. However, things back fire for Roger and Mrs. Jones decides to bring him home and…

Nonfiction versus fiction is very different for me. Fiction stories are usually intriguing, filled with suspense and drama. They always have an unexpected twist that keeps you wanting more. With nonfiction, the stories are about personal experiences and not always as exciting as a fictional story. If the nonfiction story is not correctly written, the story becomes very boring. For this assignment, I chose Joan Didion’s On Going Home and Langston Hughes’ Salvation. The two stories had an area…

Langston Hughes wrote “Dream Deferred” at a time when the rights of African Americans were severely limited in society. There were not many opportunities for people of color to advance themselves in many jobs or mediums. Throughout the poem Hughes is questioning what becomes of an individual that is not in a position to achieve their desires, or not be able to realize full potentials. In “Dream Deferred”, Langston Hughes uses similes to make the reader understand and connect with the idea that…

In his work “Salvation”, Langston Hughes, as a young African-American child, decided to describe a life-changing experience that occurred in his beliefs. At the age of twelve years old, Hughes describes that he has come to the point in his life that gained him the opportunity of being “saved” by Jesus. Just like all the other children, he was expected to accept Jesus’ into his life, and by doing so, he would be saved. Therefore, when the time came, Langston was escorted to the front row, and…

The Essays “Salvation” by Langston Hughes and “The Lottery” by Chris Abani maintain correlations regarding main ideas. In “Salvation,” Hughes retains the belief that a community enacts pressure onto its youths to comply with its customs in order to maintain orthodoxy in its society. Hughes shares his personal experience at a revival where twelve year old Hughes was pressured by his congregation to be “brought to Jesus.” Similar to Hughes, in “The Lottery,” Abani asserts that society is forcibly…

The whistling, whoo-hoo, kind of clap. The embarrassing kind. I feel the blood rush to my cheeks and almost run to my seat. I glue myself back to my seat, out of the corner of my eye, I see my teacher smile and nod in my direction. One more performance to go before they deliberate. We come back from our 30 minute deliberation break, the tension palpable in the air. I curl and uncurl my toes in my nice shoes. The screeching lady goes up to the microphone and starts screeching the usual 'don…

A film is an art form. Composer, Henry Mancini, once said, “the real creative power is in the mind and heart of the composer.” Henry Mancini was the composer for Touch of Evil and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. While these two films may seem like they don’t connect with each other at any point, they do and it is with Henry Mancini. By examining Touch of Evil and Breakfast at Tiffany’s through the lens of Henry Mancini’s music choices we can see that Mancini’s music choices were just as important as…

The process of heat-treating Knife River Flint requires a lot of time, preparation, and materials. The Knife River Flint that was used in this experiment came from Mercer County, North Dakota, which there are five different Knife River Flint Quarries in Mercer County. The three closest quarries to where the Knife River Flint in this experiment was collected are the Crowley Quarries, Medicine Butte, and Dodge Quarry. With the help of Russell Redhorn, a Native American monitor I was working…

on African-American literature, music, and art. Langston Hughes was an American author, poet and playwright and is known as one of the main literary contributors to the Harlem Renaissance. His main focus in writing was African American culture and he was among the first writers to “use jazz music and dialect to depict the life of urban blacks in his work” (A&E Network). Langston Hughes was born as James Mercer Langston Hughes, on February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. He was the great-nephew of…