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    A Study Guide for Langston Hughes's "Tambourines to Glory"
    A Study Guide for Langston Hughes's "Tambourines to Glory"
    A Study Guide for Langston Hughes's "Tambourines to Glory"
    Ebook43 pages32 minutes

    A Study Guide for Langston Hughes's "Tambourines to Glory"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Langston Hughes's "Tambourines to Glory," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 14, 2016
    ISBN9781535834650
    A Study Guide for Langston Hughes's "Tambourines to Glory"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Langston Hughes's "Tambourines to Glory" - Gale

      1

      Tambourines to Glory

      Langston Hughes

      1958

      Introduction

      Tambourines to Glory, published in 1958, is the second of Langston Hughes's two novels. (His first, Not without Laughter, was published in 1930, almost thirty years earlier.) It tells the story of two women, the religious Essie Belle Johnson and her conniving friend Laura Reed, who open a storefront church in Harlem. Essie sincerely wants to use her beautiful singing voice to bring people to God, and hopes to make enough money through the church to bring her daughter up from the South to live with her. But Laura wants only the money, which she uses for gambling, drinking, and attracting young men. The novel is rich with the spoken and sung voices of the African American community of Harlem, and derives its humor from the lively and generally appealing scoundrels who twist religion and morals for their own earthly gain.

      Hughes had written a musical play version of Tambourines to Glory in 1956, and he changed the story only slightly to create the novel. Several of the novel's thirty-six brief chapters read like a play script. The novel as a whole is noticeably without extended descriptive passages, characters' unspoken thoughts, and other qualities that often distinguish prose fiction from drama.

      Author Biography

      James Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. His unusual middle name had been the birth name of his mother, a teacher. His father was a lawyer and businessman. Hughes grew up mainly in Lawrence, Kansas, a lonely child drawn to reading and writing. His first poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, was published in the June 1921 issue of the magazine Crisis, edited by the sociologist and political leader W. E. B. DuBois. It became one of Hughes's best-known and most anthologized poems.

      After a year at Columbia University in New York, Hughes took simple jobs, traveled around the world, and continued to publish poems. He returned to the United States in 1924, already recognized as one of the most talented young African American poets in the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes thrived in the atmosphere of Harlem, soaking up jazz and blues music, leftist politics, and racial pride. Within the next six years he would graduate from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and publish two highly regarded collections of poems, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), and a novel, Not without Laughter (1930). Through the next twenty-five years Hughes published more poetry, some of it rather radical politically, as well as plays, short stories, essays, and a weekly newspaper column. His writing explored and celebrated the African American experience, often incorporating musical elements and themes.

      Throughout this period, Hughes

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