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    A Study Guide for Langston Hughes 's "Thank You Ma'am"
    A Study Guide for Langston Hughes 's "Thank You Ma'am"
    A Study Guide for Langston Hughes 's "Thank You Ma'am"
    Ebook37 pages20 minutes

    A Study Guide for Langston Hughes 's "Thank You Ma'am"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Langston Hughes 's "Thank You Ma'am," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories 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 Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535834827
    A Study Guide for Langston Hughes 's "Thank You Ma'am"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Langston Hughes 's "Thank You Ma'am" - Gale

      10

      Thank You, Ma'm

      Langston Hughes

      1963

      Introduction

      Poet, short-story writer, novelist, and essayist James Langston Hughes is generally ranked among the greatest black American writers of the first half of the twentieth century, along with Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright. Slightly older than the others, Hughes was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flourishing of black artistic achievement in Harlem in New York City in the 1920s. Hughes traveled widely, and his aesthetic and political views were informed by the wider perspective of an international black community embracing Paris, Africa, and the Caribbean. Hughes wrote Thank You, Ma'm in the mid-1950s and published it in 1963 in Something in Common and Other Stories at the end of his career, when the pace of change in the lives of black Americans was accelerating rapidly with the social and political changes of the civil rights movement. In a sense, it is a last look back at the earlier black society of Hughes's youth.

      Thank You, Ma'm is widely available as one of the most commonly anthologized of Hughes's short stories. The story concerns the decline of Hughes's beloved Harlem neighborhood in the 1950s and 1960s, and serves as an allegory of the need for the black community to resist and reverse that decline.

      Author Biography

      James Langston Hughes (who wrote as Langston Hughes) was born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902. His mother, Caroline (Carrie) Mercer Langston, came from the upper class of the African American community (her uncle was a congressman during Reconstruction, a high-ranking American diplomat, and eventually the president of a college). She was determined to make a career on Broadway, however, and went to New York shortly after graduating from high school. She found no success, and eventually worked as a teacher. She married James Hughes and the family would have had a comfortable middle-class life. After completing correspondence law courses and being denied the opportunity to sit for the bar exam, James Hughes could no longer bear the racial discrimination blacks faced in the United States; the Hugheses moved to Mexico City. Carrie did not like Mexico and she and Langston quickly returned to the United States. Langston went to live with his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston (whose first husband was killed fighting with John

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