A Study Guide for Hughes's Montage of a Dream Deferred

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Hughes's "Montage of a Dream Deferred," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary Themes for Students: The American Dream.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 Literary Themes for Students: The American Dream for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781535828802

Book preview

1

Montage of a Dream Deferred

Langston Hughes

1951

Introduction

What happens to a dream deferred? That question—one of the most famous lines of poetry to issue from the pen of an American writer—captures the essence of Langston Hughes's 1951 work Montage of a Dream Deferred. In this tightly interwoven collection, the dream deferred is the collective dream of the African Americans. Although slavery was abolished nearly a century before, black Americans in the 1940s and 1950s were still not seen as equals in the eyes of the general public nor, often, in the eyes of local and state lawmakers. While white Americans were riding a wave of post-World War II prosperity toward the fulfillment of their vision of the American dream, most blacks were left waiting for their opportunity to join in the country's success.

A montage is an artistic work that consists of smaller pieces of art combined into a unified whole that reveals a larger picture or meaning. This is an accurate description of Montage of a Dream Deferred, which Hughes preferred to think of as a single, book-length poem. Recurring themes and phrases occur throughout the smaller poetic works that make up the book; in fact, the book begins and ends with the same two lines: "Good morning, daddy! / Ain't you