The Ways of White Folks is a collection of short stories written by Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance...

, published in 1934. Hughes wrote the book during a year he spent living in Carmel, California. The collection, "marked by pessimism about race relations, as well as a sardonic

Sardonicism

Sardonicism is the expression of derision, cynicism or skeptical humor variously through comment, gesture or writing.- Origin :...

 realism," is among his most well known works. Like Chesnutt's

Charles W. Chesnutt

Charles Waddell Chesnutt was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South, where the legacy of slavery and interracial relations had resulted in many free...

 The Conjure Woman

The Conjure Woman

The Conjure Woman is a 1926 race film directed, written, produced and distributed by Oscar Micheaux. The film, which stars Evelyn Preer, is based on the 1899 short story collection by the African American writer Charles W. Chesnutt....

(1899) and Wright's

Richard Wright (author)

Richard Nathaniel Wright was an African-American author of sometimes controversial novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially those involving the plight of African-Americans during the late 19th to mid 20th centuries...

 Uncle Tom's Children

Uncle Tom's Children

Uncle Tom's Children is a collection of short stories by African American author Richard Wright, also the author of Black Boy, Native Son, and The Outsider. Uncle Tom's Children includes four short stories and was successful when it was first published in 1938...

(1938), it is an example of a short story cycle

Short story cycle

A short story cycle is a collection of short stories in which the narratives are specifically composed and arranged with the goal of creating an enhanced or different experience when reading the group as a whole as opposed to its individual parts...

.

The collection consists of 14 short stories:

1. "Cora Unashamed"
2. "Slave on the Block"
3. "Home"
4. "Passing"
5. "A Good Job Gone"
6. "Rejuvenation Through Joy"
7. "The Blues I'm Playing"
8. "Red-Headed Baby"
9. "Poor Little Black Fellow"
10. "Little Dog"
11. "Berry"
12. "Mother and Child"
13. "One Christmas Eve"
14. "Father and Son"

In September 1996, upon the publication of a comprehensive edition of Hughes's short stories entitled The Short Stories of Langston Hughes (ISBN 0-8090-1603-6), David Herbert Donald

David Herbert Donald

- Career :Majoring in history and sociology, Donald earned his bachelor degree from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. He earned his PhD in 1946 under the eminent, leading Lincoln scholar, James G. Randall at the University of Illinois...

, in a review published by The New York Times, wrote:

Hughes's short stories might occupy a larger place in American literature had they all lived up to the standard he set in The Ways of White Folks, written when he was under the immediate influence of D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...

 and when he was still a passionate socialist. He could not sustain the tone of those powerful, polemical pieces. Temperamentally averse to confrontation, in subsequent years he allowed his tone to slip from irony to sarcasm, and his later short stories — some of which ran to only two or three pages — were often scenes or vignettes, without much room for characterization or development.

"Cora Unashamed"

David Herbert Donald called "Cora Unashamed" — one of the stories in The Ways of White Folks — "a brilliantly realized portrait of an isolated black woman in a small Middle Western town, who stoically survives her own sorrows but in the end lashes out against the hypocrisy of the whites who employ her." That story was adapted into a film

Literary adaptation

Literary adaptation is the adapting of a literary source to another genre or medium, such as a film, a stage play, or even ace video game...

 of the same name

Cora Unashamed

Cora Unashamed is a TV movie from The American Collection directed by Deborah M. Pratt, starring Regina Taylor and Cherry Jones, and released in 2000. The movie is based on a short story by the same name in The Ways of White Folks, a collection of short stories by Langston Hughes...

 from The American Collection

The American Collection

The American Collection was a spinoff series of Masterpiece Theater, which ran from 2000 to 2003, for the former series' 30th anniversary. It was funded originally by Exxon Mobil ; however, funding for both series was withdrawn in 2005. It aired on PBS...

 directed by Deborah M. Pratt

Deborah Pratt

Deborah M. Pratt is an American actress, writer and television producer. She was a co-executive producer and a writer on the Quantum Leap TV series which was created by her then-husband, Donald Bellisario, and acted in television series including Quantum Leap, Magnum, P.I. and Airwolf...

, starring Regina Taylor

Regina Taylor

Regina Taylor is an American actress and playwright. She has won several awards throughout her career, including a Golden Globe Award and NAACP Image Award.-Biography:...

 and Cherry Jones

Cherry Jones

Cherry Jones is an American actress and recipient of the 2009 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress – Drama Series and the 2005 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play.-Career:...

, and released in 2000. Cinematographer Ernest Holzman won an American Society of Cinematographers (ASC)

American Society of Cinematographers

The American Society of Cinematographers is an educational, cultural, and professional organization. It is not a labor union, and it is not a guild. Membership is by invitation and is extended only to directors of photography and special effects experts with distinguished credits in the film...

Award, for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography in Movies of the Week/Mini-Series'/Pilot for Network or Basic Broadcast TV, for his work on this film.

External links

, featuring three of the short stories from The Ways of White Folks