Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Langston Hughes’s book of poems Montage of a Dream Deferred. I play it cool And dig all jive That’s the reason I stay alive. My motto As I live and learn Is dig and be dug in return. So goes the poem “Motto” in Langston Hughes’s 1951 jazz collection, Montage of a Dream Deferred. The list of my favorite Langston Hughes poems would be long indeed, but no volume of his poetry makes my heart sing like Montage of a Dream Deferred. Not only does it include justly famous poems like “Harlem” and “Theme for English B” and lesser known poems like “Motto.” But it also – taken as a whole volume as Hughes intended – provides a marvelous portrait of the African American community in post-World War II Harlem. The story goes that Hughes wrote Montage of a Dream Deferred in a creative outburst in one week in September 1948. Hughes had just moved into his own home after being a renter his entire adult life. Writing to a friend, Hughes described Montage as “a full book-length poem in five sections,” “a pr