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From the beginning of his literary career, Jazz has been a key element in Langston Hughes’s literary works. As he asserted in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Jazz to him was “one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, . . .; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.” Such an understanding of jazz was closely related with optimism and black pride around the Harlem Renaissance because at that time not a few African American writers cherished a vision that the American dream would be realized sooner or later. However, the Depression and the Second World War narrowed the chance to open the door leading to the American dream. Out of the frustration, disenchantment, and revolt against the white-centered American society, African American jazz musicians created and developed so called bebop. And from the bebop, Langston Hughes heard “a prophetic commentary on the state of African American reality.” Thus, I want to examine Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred based on the jazz aesthetics and find that Hughes is a writer “committed to the possibilities of language to generate social awareness and, ultimately, to compel social change.”