Reviews

This insightful book is one of the few books to connect the resistance of the Harlem Renaissance with the 1960s fight for civil rights. From Library Journal ★ Miller (English, North Carolina State Univ.; Origins of the Dream) studies the mutually beneficial connection between pianist, songwriter, and singer Nina Simone (1933–2003) and poet Langston Hughes (1901–67). Miller maintains that Hughes was Simone’s closest confidant, a relationship that formed an intergenerational bo

By Allison Escoto From Booklist "Miller’s writing is vivid and transporting. . . . A must-read for American history, music, and literature buffs." The fascinating lives, enduring influence, and deep friendship of two of America’s most prominent artists, Langston Hughes and Nina Simone, are given long-overdue attention. As Miller writes in his prologue, “From their first encounter to the last time they met, the two were bound by chords that still resonate in the ears of those

From Publishers Weekly An eye-opening portrait of two civil rights crusaders. The author scrupulously details how Hughes’s political poetry influenced Simone to speak out on social justice issues with songs like “Mississippi Goddam,” and the narrative is bolstered by ample photographs, handwritten notes, album covers, and promotional materials. It adds up to an eye-opening portrait of two civil rights crusaders.

From Literary Hub In something like a biography of a friendship, Miller takes a deep, historical look at the relationship between two heavyweights of American culture, Langston Hughes and Nina Simone, and how their virtuosic moral and artistic talents were foundational to the mass-cultural power of the Civil Rights movement. Read more ...

By Alexandra Erdos From Researchgate.net Little is it known that Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech from 1963 was inspired by “I Dream a World,” a poem written by Langston Hughes in 1941 and published in 1945. King’s famous speech echoes Hughes’ words and ideas from 20 years before, and almost exactly mirrors the way the two icons spoke, as if they were contemporaries. The new biography, as part of the Critical Lives series, aims to present critical figures o

From GLReview By Martha E Stone A physically attractive book, with heavy, glossy pages and some rarely seen black-and-white images Carl Van Vechten photo of Langston Hughes. Courtesy Beinecke Library, Yale. LANGSTON HUGHES (1902–1967), one of the best-known writers of the Harlem Renaissance, remains an endlessly fascinating, charismatic figure. He was born into a chaotic but well-educated and politically connected family, sometimes living with his mother or grandmother or fam

In a meticulous combination of close reading, biblical exegesis, and literary analysis, W. Jason Miller, in Origins of the Dream: Hughes's Poetry and King's Rhetoric, offers an intriguing reinterpretation of Langston Hughes by demonstrating the influence Hughes's poetry exerted on the rhetoric of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Miller focuses on the metaphor of the dream, which, in his formulation, derives principally from three of Hughes's poems: "Youth," "I Dream a World," and

By Tim Peeler From NC State University News In his new book Origins of the Dream , NC State English professor Jason Miller makes a tangible connection between the long suspected but never proven link between the poetry of Harlem Renaissance hero Langston Hughes and the prose of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. This is Miller’s second book on the poetry of Hughes. His first, Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture , was published in 2011. Miller, a former colle

By John Hyland From Project Muse Thick descriptions of social contexts and nuanced close readings ... a tightly constructed study W. Jason Miller’s Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture opens with this observation: “Langston Hughes never lived in an America where the very real threat of lynching did not exist” (1). Despite this fact, an in-depth study of Hughes’s relationship to these gruesome events that marked his lifetime has not been undertaken until now. While of

From ResearchGate (originally published in an academic journal) An important contribution to recent scholarship attempting to understand lynching within a broad American context. W. Jason Miller’s Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture is an important contribution to recent scholarship attempting to understand lynching within a broad American context. Most analysis of lynching and literary responses to it focuses on the period between 1880 and 1920, when the number of