Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: The Daily Poem
Episode: Langston Hughes' "Harlem"
Description: Today’s poem is one of the most recognizable and influential American poems of the twentieth century.Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. He sought to honestly portray the joys and hardships of working-class black lives, avoiding both sentimental idealization and negative stereotypes.Hughes’s position in the American literary scene seems to be secure. David Littlejohn wrote that...