Hughes, Hurston, and Holiday were all products of the "Harlem Renaissance." Each of them, in their works, were bound to a common purpose: to define the African American lifestyle.

Hughes expresses his purpose in his poem "Cultural Exchange." Hughes describes where and how the African American life is lived in the South.  He begins with the "quarter" of the "Negros," the places in which they live. These homes are by the "river" and the "railroad," places deemed undesirable by the "white" people. Both "dreams and nightmares" haunt this afflicted race. They dream of the day when they get a taste of "power."

Hurston also conveys her purpose, to define the African American Lifestyle, in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.  One passage in particular that does this is "Jody's" funeral. This passage showed white readers that African Americans were much like themselves, right down to...