e presented for the inspection of white audiences. While Hughes was not unsympathetic to the feelings of such critics, he rejected their basic assumptions as a willingness to allow the dominant white society to dictate the terms upon which black people, their values, and their lifestyles would be judged. During the highly politicized 1930s, Hughes journeyed to the Soviet Union with a group of black filmmakers. Growing disillusioned with the filmmakers and their project, he toured Russia and parts of Asia on his own. Despite his interest in leftist political causes, he apparently never became a communist. After his return to America, he was involved in the founding of several theatrical companies in Harlem, Los Angeles, and Chicago. He also wrote and published some overtly political poetry, including defenses of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black youths in the deep South who had been, under sensational and extremely dubious circumstances, convicted of raping two young white women. His most important later volume of poetry is unquestionably Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), which weaves lyrics drawn from the lives of the people of Harlem--Hughes's home from 1947 to the end of his life--into a unified work that gives a remarkably full and vivid portrait of a community, its hopes and fears, its aspirations and frustrations. One of its most famous lyrics would later provide the title for Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun.Hughes also became an extremely prolific writer of prose, publishing two autobiographies, two novels, several volumes of short stories, and a number of plays. By far his best-known and most beloved fictional creation was Jesse B. Semple, a Virginia native and Harlem resident known affectionately as "Simple." His complicated love life, his anger and frustration at the indignities of segregation, his innate sorrow in the midst of a humorous and often sardonic approach to life--all of these aspects of his nature were...
