Langston Hughes's "Bricks of Compromise"

FAIN: FT-52660-04

David Evan Chinitz
Loyola University, Chicago (Chicago, IL 60611-2147)

I propose to develop an article on Langston Hughes’s negotiations with political and ethical compromise. Always ambivalent about the virtue of compromise, Hughes nevertheless developed into a master of that unglamorous art, and my essay will show the effects of compromise in his poetry and prose as he responded to the challenges he faced as an African-American public intellectual. This essay draws together my published articles on Hughes and a piece now in progress, all of which show how Hughes labored to steer between various extremes. Ultimately I intend to synthesize this work in a book on Hughes’s "middle way" in ethics and aesthetics.