ABSTRACT
Two New Negro writers seem to have established themselves as self-conscious exiles or expatriates who wrote about their experience of being separated from the American homeland along with its values—Langston Hughes and Claude McKay. If black writers between 1865 and the First World War displayed little significance, both in terms of the primacy of their literature and the expatriate influence, all this changed by 1917 when black American troops returned from Europe. During the 1920s, when a large group of white Americans lived in Europe as expatriates, black writers and artists also spent time on that continent, though they were generally stuck away in third class or transatlantic steamers and are rarely mentioned among the so-called lost generation. Langston Hughes’s expatriate years coincide with a growing international solidarity among writers and artists, particularly black writers and artist that would lead to his ability to discover deeper meaning in his own black identity.
