Hughes and the Author

In his essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Langston Hughes addresses the question, “What is the author?” or rather, “What is the artist?”

Hughes believes that the Negro artist faces racial challenges, especially Negro artists like the young Negro poet that he describes in the beginning of the essay. The poet is a Negro, and he wants to be a poet, but a White poet, not a Negro poet, as a result of Caucasian racial influences both inside and outside of his home (NA 1313-1314). Hughes seems to believe that the author is shaped by what they are taught, and agreeably so. “..[H]ow difficult it would be for an artist born in such a home to interest himself in interpreting the beauty of his own people. He is never taught to see that beauty. He is taught rather not to see it, or if he does, to be ashamed of it when it is not according to Caucasian patterns” (NA 1314). How can the artist recognize what he is not taught to recognize? How can he even know that the beauty of his people exists, when White influences are all he knows? How can the artist see that he has beauty to communicate, or a truth to communicate, if such truths are always stifled? For Hughes, he is sorry for this poet, this artist (NA 1313), because he is approaching African American artistry in the wrong way.

Hughes also believes that the Negro artist, or any artist, “must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose” (NA 1317). I agree with Hughes on this point, that artistic freedom should be available, but that the artist should never feel ashamed of what they choose to produce, or what they choose to reveal. According to Hughes, artists can be “free within [them]selves” (NA 1317), they can reach the truth because it is accessible within their very being.