Hughes’ “Genius Child” and Albee’s The Death of Bessie Smith: Studies on the Fated Lives of the Black Geniuses in the Mid-20th Century America - Laizu Nasrin

Hughes’ “Genius Child” and Albee’s The Death of Bessie Smith: Studies on the Fated Lives of the Black Geniuses in the Mid-20th Century America Laizu Nasrin, PhD Associate Professor and Chair, Department of English, Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh Email: laizu@juniv.edu Abstract: In the race and class divided American society of the mid-20th century, the black geniuses were usually viewed with suspicion both by the white community and the state. Such individuals were frequently seen to undergo not only social abuses but also state-promoted oppressing actions and harassments. Sometimes the mistreatment was so severe that it became life-threatening or fatal. Literary works relating to the exploitation of the black people, however, are often found to deal mostly with the issues of the masses, and thus, to leave the gifted ones underrepresented. Interestingly, Langston Hughes and Edward Albee, two 20th Century American writers of two different races, are detected to produce two mentionable literary works—“Genius Child” (1947) and The Death of Bessie Smith (1960) respectively—that help the readers to have some sort of understanding of the harsh realities that the gifted black persons had to go through in the mid-20th century America. This paper, therefore, presents a detailed analysis of the aforementioned texts with a view to revealing the cruel facts of the fated lives of the black geniuses of the said time.