32 pages • 1 hour read
Langston HughesMother to Son
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
"The Weary Blues" by Langston Hughes (1925)
One of Hughes’s most famous poems, “The Weary Blues” is an example of Hughes’s jazz poems of the Harlem Renaissance. The poem is set in a bar in Harlem as the speaker observes a pianist playing blues music. The poem creatively utilizes literary devices like rhyme and meter that come together to embody blues as a form and a metaphor. The poem is considered one of the first works of blues performance in literature, and its vivid imagery and language highlight the struggle of life for a Black American man during the mid-1920s.
"If We Must Die" by Claude McKay (1919)
“If We Must Die” by African American poet Claude McKay is a response to racial violence against Black Americans during the Red Summer of 1919, a period after the First World War when white supremacist terrorism and riots took place across the United States, resulting in numerous deaths of African Americans. Although the poem does not mention any specific marginalized group, it is a traditional Shakespearean sonnet that encourages strength and hope against a deadly mob. The poem is considered by some to be the official start to the Harlem Renaissance as a literary movement.
"We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks (1959)
Many critics consider “We Real Cool” to be a paragon of jazz poetry. One of Gwendolyn Brooks’s most famous poems, it is about rebellious youth and utilizes parallelism and simple syntax. First published in her poetry collection The Bean Eaters, "We Real Cool" describes a group of teenagers who hang out at the pool hall, drinking and skipping school with the prophetic warning that the teenagers will die soon. The poem is both a celebration of rebellion and a challenge to authority. It is a cautionary tale about getting into trouble.
Further Literary Resources
Cane by Jean Toomer (1923)
Jean Toomer’s innovative literary work Cane incorporates various storytelling methods, including that of both poetry and short stories. The novel attempts to capture Black life and culture of the American South. Impressionistic, disjointed, and deeply imaginative, Cane is at times surreal in its depiction of both city and country life. Utilizing symbols like smoke and sugarcane, as well as recurring motifs like dusk and dawn, the work examines both the appeal and the dark reality of Black Americans who stayed in the south. Cane is not only an iconic work of the Harlem Renaissance but is also situated within the American Modernist canon.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
One of the most enduring books to come out of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God follows the headstrong, practical, and fiercely independent Janie Crawford through her three vastly different romances in the setting of the early 20th-century American South. Janie, a light-skinned Black woman, faces poverty, abuse, tragedy, and loss yet remains confident and clever in the face of those who disapprove. Hopeful but bittersweet, Their Eyes is rich with the culture and folklore for which Hurston is famous and is perhaps the most widely read African American novel.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969)
Maya Angelou’s most celebrated and renowned autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings recalls the life and childhood of the poet and author. The memoir, both deeply painful and profoundly joyous, details a young Angelou’s experience growing up in a small Southern town facing racial and class prejudice, and later, sexual violence. Years later, Angelou discovers her love for literature and the power words have to set her free.
Listen to Poem
Award-winning actress Viola Davis reads aloud Langston Hughes’s 1922 poem “Mother to Son.”
Related Titles
By Langston Hughes
