English 102 Dr. Monahan
Literary Research Paper
Your assignment is to do a research paper of approximately 4-8 pages on the American author, Langston Hughes. Your paper should be research based. That means you must make references to articles written by others about the work of Langston Hughes. The paper should include the following:
- An introduction of which briefly covers the life of the author and mentions some of his major themes. Make sure you cite information that is not your own.
- A discussion of some of his major writings. In this discussion, mention what others who have written about Hughes say about his writings. Do not simply summarize the stories or poems. In your discussion, mention at least 3 of the ones listed below. You can certainly mention others, but you must include three or more of these:
- “Salvation”
- “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
- “Mother to Son”
- “One Friday Morning”
- “Harlem”
- Finally, write a summary in which you talk about your conclusions about the work of this author. You can discuss anything that you feel is relevant, but you might talk about how his work relates to what is going on today. You can use the ideas of others in this part, but if you do, you must cite.
- The paper should end with a list of works cited. You do not need to cite the readings by Hughes that you did since mostly they are from your textbook. But you must cite articles about him that you read. You need a total of 4 articles. Two of them must be the ones below. You can find them via the WCC library.
Domina, Lynn. "About Langston Hughes." The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Exploration of Literature,
Greenwood, 2015, pp. 6-8. Historical Explorations of Literature. Gale
eBooks.
Watson, Renee. "Remember Langston Hughes’s Anger Alongside His Joy." Feb 01 2018. The New York Times.
Good luck. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. If you wish, I am glad to look at early drafts of your paper.
