From the moment authors of African descent set story to paper, they were expected to write with a singular purpose in mind — the battle for freedom. Former slaves used the quill to depict the terror of the middle passage and the cruelty of the sociopathic master. They told of harrowing escapes and how they learned to read and write, sometimes by tricking a white person to teach them, and others by trading something of value. For Black authors, both blood and ink were to be used in the fight against slavery.
Later during the Harlem Renaissance, African American intellectuals believed that producing a body of literature was one of the few ways African Americans could prove that they had the intellectual capacity for full citizenship. Further, the work must be written in ways that dominant society would accept as worthy. As a result, Countee Cullen modeled his poems on Keats. Claude McKay used the sonnet form to write his famous poem, "If We Must Die." When writers strayed they were criticized like Langston Hughes, who improvised until his poems felt like jazz, or ostracized like Zora Neale Hurston, who traveled the south to record African American lived experiences and folklore.
