Indledning
The title of the short story is ‘One Friday Morning’, and it is written by James Mercer Langston Hughes, who lived in the period from 1901 to 1967.
Langston Hughes was an African American poet, social activist, and novelist.
He is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, which was a revival of African American art and literature.
Moreover, the short story was published in 1941 and is a part of the book, ‘The Short Stories of Langston Hughes’.
The themes of this novel are racism and segregation. In the story we get a clear picture of how it is to be a coloured American at that time.
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Uddrag
“She was smart, pretty, brown and fitted in well with the life of the school. She stood high in scholarship, played a swell game of basketball, had taken part in the senior musical in a soft velvety voice” (p. 1, stanza 3).
The number of adjectives implies that Nancy is one of the best students. That statement is supported by the award her picture is given.
In the third stanza on page 5 the school principal, Miss O’Shay, claims that Nancy’s picture won the Artist Club scholarship.
Moreover, Nancy and her family are African Americans and have lived in America for long time.
The evidence for this is on the third page in the first stanza: "Nancy Lee was proud of being American, a Negro American with blood out of Africa a long time ago, too many generations back to count."
Although, Nancy is an African American girl, the sentence suggests that her colour does not bother her, and she is proud of being a Negro American. Nancy Lee is also well-liked among her white classmates.
An example of this can be found on page 1 in the 3rd stanza: “But seldom did her high-school classmates think of her as coloured”.
We get a picture of an equal society, where the colour of an individual’s skin does not matter and is rarely spoken about.
The main focus of this short story is to show how Nancy’s view of the American Dream changes throughout the story.
At the beginning, Nancy’s picture is idyllically described as a spring day, with new grass fresh and green, a blue sky, paper-white clouds and just a slight breeze.
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