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Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun

Hansberry wrote this play in the early 1950s, but the play is similarly notable as an echo of the predominant themes of the Harlem Renaissance. This echo is evident in the title, which comes from a line in a Langston Hughes poem titled “Harlem.”

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 “Theme for English B.”

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