W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

Du Bois’s masterpiece helped establish the intellectual foundations for discourse on Black liberation throughout the twentieth century, and especially during the Harlem Renaissance. For this reason alone, it’s worth connecting to Hughes’s poetry of the time.

Langston Hughes, “The Weary Blues”

Hughes’s “The Weary Blues,” first appeared in 1925, and is a landmark poem of the Harlem Renaissance. Like "I, Too," it appeared in Hughes's debut poetry collection, The Weary Blues.

Richard Wright, Native Son

Wright’s novel, first published in 1940, tells the story of an ordinary Black man named Bigger Thomas, who unintentionally murders a white woman. Although very different in terms of subject matter, it’s worth connecting to Hughes’s poetry, which is similarly interested in the trials and travails of ordinary Black people.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Ellison’s 1952 novel is contemporary to Hughes’s poem, and much of the novel also takes place in New York City. Though seen from a very different angle, Ellison’s examination of a highly intelligent and curious young Black man in the early to mid-twentieth century in New York provides an interesting foil to the speaker of “I, Too.”