Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 - May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. He moved to New York City as a young man, where he made his career.
"It is this treatment of race that makes Pudd'nhead Wilson as contemporary as Little Rock, and Mark Twain as modern as Faulkner, although Twain died when Faulkner was in knee pants."
-introduction to Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1959)
LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) Poet, novelist, essayist
"Nobody calls Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson a novel of racial protest, but the comment it makes on what they call race relations is pretty strong. It's a wild book. I've never seen anything so strong."
-interview in the San Francisco Chronicle (1964)
Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1914 - April 16, 1994) was an American novelist, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. Novelist, literary critic
"The spoken idiom of Negro Americans, its flexibility, it musicality, its rhythms, free-wheeling diction, and metaphors, as projected in Negro American folklore, were absorbed by the creators of our great nineteenth-century literature even when the majority of blacks were still enslaved. Mark Twain celebrated it in the prose of Huckleberry Finn."
- (1970)
David Bradley | Novelist, Winner of Pen-Faulkner award
"Huckleberry Finn is a black novel. Yes, you've seen pictures of Samuel Clemens, and he's white. Super white. White hair. White suit. White skin. But nobody's ever seen Mark Twain, who was a figment-and a pigment-of Samuel Clemens' imagination. And Mark Twain was black."
-address delivered in Hartford, Connecticut (1985)
Toni Morrison | Novelist, Nobel Prize Winner
"The 1880s saw the collapse of civil rights for Blacks as well as the publication of Huckleberry Finn. This collapse was an effort to bury the combustible issues Twain raised in his novel. The nation, as well as Tom Sawyer, was deferring Jim's Freedom in agonizing play."
- (1996)
Richard Pryor | Comedian
"Seriously, though, two things people throughout history have held in common are hatred and humor. I am proud that, like Mark Twain, I have been able to use humor to lessen people's hatred."
-on receiving first Mark Twain Prize at the Kennedy Center (1998)
Richard Wright (September 4, 1908 - November 28, 1960) was an American author of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially related to the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, who suffered discrimination and violence in the South and the North. Novelist, poet, essayist
"Twain hid his conflict in satire and wept in private over the brutalities and the injustices of his civilization."
Sterling Brown | Literary critic, professor at Howard University
"Jim is the best example in nineteenth-century fiction of the average Negro slave (not the tragic mulatto or noble savage), illiterate, superstitious, yet clinging to his hope for freedom, to his love for his own. And he is completely believable, whether arguing that Frenchmen should talk like people, or doing most of the work on the raft."
-The Negro in American Fiction (1937)
Adapted from The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on his life and Works, edited by Dr. Shelley Fisher Fishkin.