Based on your analysis of Langston Hughes essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) and Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937), write a paper that addresses the following questions or come up with your own questions:
• What is the role of an African American writer according to Langston Hughes and Richard Wright?” • According to Hughes and Wright what should an African American writer write about?
• What is the African American author’s responsibility as a writer and as a representative of her race? • Comment on the Marxist influence on both these works
• What is the importance (or limitations) of Hughes’ and Wright’s arguments in these two essays?
• As you begin to conclude your essay try to assess the relevance of these two essays in our current times. You could also begin your introduction with a reference to something that a contemporary Black writer might have said about the craft of writing recently or an incident that demonstrates a social reality that working class African Americans still face, and how these issues have prompted poems, novels and essays by Black authors in the U.S. (examples of such authors include Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jesmyn Ward, and others). You can also use examples of authors who were writing in the post-Civil Rights era such as James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and many others. This would then allow you to connect the opening anecdote in your introduction to your conclusion, as you address the question of the relevance of these essays in our times.
You should try to address these questions not as a catalogue of answers to these questions but organically, in order to show the ways in which these two essays are in agreement with each other although published 10 years apart. Do not write a general essay on the role of an African American writer. Your essay should analyze in detail the different facets of Hughes’ and Wright’s essays, but also weave in the importance or relevance of these works in the now.
