langston hughes biography facts

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Langston Hughes

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Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance , the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. He sought to honestly portray the joys and hardships of working-class black lives, avoiding both sentimental idealization and negative stereotypes. As he wrote in his essay “ The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain ,” “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.”

This approach was not without its critics. Much of Hughes’s early work was roundly criticized by many black intellectuals for portraying what they thought to be an unattractive view of black life. In his autobiographical  The Big Sea,  Hughes commented:

Fine Clothes to the Jew [Hughes’s second book] was well received by the literary magazines and the white press, but the Negro critics did not like it at all. The Pittsburgh Courier ran a big headline across the top of the page, LANGSTON HUGHES’ BOOK OF POEMS TRASH. The headline in the New York Amsterdam News was LANGSTON HUGHES THE SEWER DWELLER. The Chicago Whip characterized me as ‘the poet low- rate of Harlem.’ Others called the book a disgrace to the race, a return to the dialect tradition, and a parading of all our racial defects before the public. … The Negro critics and many of the intellectuals were very sensitive about their race in books. (And still are.) In anything that white people were likely to read, they wanted to put their best foot forward, their politely polished and cultural foot—and only that foot.

In fact, the title  Fine Clothes to the Jew,  which was misunderstood and disliked by many people, was derived from the Harlemites Hughes saw pawning their own clothing; most of the pawn shops and other stores in Harlem at that time were owned by Jewish people. Lindsay Patterson, a novelist who served as Hughes’s assistant, believed that Hughes was

critically, the most abused poet in America. …  Serious white critics ignored him, less serious ones compared his poetry to Cassius Clay doggerel, and most black critics only grudgingly admired him. Some, like James Baldwin, were downright malicious about his poetic achievement. But long after Baldwin and the rest of us are gone, I suspect Hughes’ poetry will be blatantly around growing in stature until it is recognized for its genius. Hughes … was unashamedly black at a time when blackness was démodé. He had the wit and intelligence to explore the black human condition in a variety of depths, but his tastes and selectivity were not always accurate, and pressures to survive as a black writer in a white society (and it was a miracle that he did for so long) extracted an enormous creative toll.

Nevertheless, Hughes, more than any other black poet or writer, recorded faithfully the nuances of black life and its frustrations. In Hughes’s own words, his poetry is about "workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago—people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July."

Hoyt W. Fuller commented that Hughes "chose to identify with plain black people … precisely because he saw more truth and profound significance in doing so. Perhaps in this he was inversely influenced by his father—who, frustrated by being the object of scorn in his native land, rejected his own people. Perhaps the poet’s reaction to his father’s flight from the American racial reality drove him to embrace it with extra fervor.” (Langston Hughes’s parents separated shortly after his birth and his father moved to Mexico. The elder Hughes came to feel a deep dislike and revulsion for other African-Americans.)

Although Hughes had trouble with both black and white critics, he was the first black American to earn his living solely from his writing and public lectures. Part of the reason he was able to do this was the phenomenal acceptance and love he received from average black people. A reviewer for  Black World  noted in 1970: "Those whose prerogative it is to determine the rank of writers have never rated him highly, but if the weight of public response is any gauge then Langston Hughes stands at the apex of literary relevance among Black  people. The poet occupies such a position in the memory of his people precisely because he recognized that ‘we possess within ourselves a great reservoir of physical and spiritual strength,’ and because he used his artistry to reflect this back to the people." Hughes brought a varied and colorful background to his writing. Before he was 12 years old he had lived in six different American cities. When his first book was published, he had already been a truck farmer, cook, waiter, college graduate, sailor, and doorman at a nightclub in Paris, and had visited Mexico, West Africa, the Azores, the Canary Islands, Holland, France, and Italy. As David Littlejohn observed in his  Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes:  "On the whole, Hughes’ creative life [was] as full, as varied, and as original as Picasso’s, a joyful, honest  monument of a career. There [was] no noticeable sham in it, no pretension, no self-deceit; but a great, great deal of delight and smiling irresistible wit. If he seems for the moment upstaged by angrier men, by more complex  artists, if ‘different views engage’ us, necessarily, at this trying stage of the race war, he may well outlive them all, and still be there when it’s over. … Hughes’ [greatness] seems to derive from his anonymous unity with his people. He  seems  to speak for millions, which is a tricky thing to do. Hughes reached many people through his popular fictional character, Jesse B. Semple (shortened to Simple). Simple is a poor man who lives in Harlem, a kind of comic no-good, a stereotype Hughes turned to advantage. He tells his stories to Boyd, the foil in the stories who is a writer much like Hughes, in return for a drink. His tales of his troubles with work, women, money, and life in general often reveal, through their very simplicity, the problems of being a poor black man in a racist society. “White folks,” Simple once commented, “is the cause of a lot of inconvenience in my life.” Simple’s musings first appeared in 1942 in “From Here to Yonder,” a column Hughes wrote for the  Chicago Defender  and later for the  New York Post.  According to a reviewer for  Kirkus Reviews,  their original intent was “to convince black Americans to support the U.S. war effort.” They were later published in several volumes. A more recent collection, 1994’s  The Return of Simple,  contains previously unpublished material but remains current in its themes, according to a  Publishers Weekly  critic who noted Simple’s addressing of such issues as political correctness, children’s rights, and the racist undercurrent behind contraception and sterilization proposals. Donald C. Dickinson wrote in his  Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes  that "[the] charm of Simple lies in his uninhibited pursuit of those two universal goals, understanding and security. As with most other humans, he usually fails to achieve either of these goals and sometimes once achieved they disappoint him. … Simple has a tough resilience, however, that won’t allow him to brood over a failure very long. … Simple is a well-developed character, both believable and lovable. The situations he meets and discusses are so true to life everyone may enter the fun."

 A reviewer for  Black World commented on the popularity of Simple: “The people responded. Simple lived in a world they knew, suffered their pangs, experienced their joys, reasoned in their way, talked their talk, dreamed their dreams, laughed their laughs, voiced their fears—and all the while underneath, he affirmed the wisdom which anchored at the base of their lives.” Hoyt W. Fuller believed that, like Simple, "the key to Langston Hughes … was the poet’s deceptive and  profound  simplicity. Profound because it was both  willed and ineffable, because some intuitive sense even at the beginning of his adulthood taught him that humanity was of the essence and that it existed undiminished in all shapes, sizes, colors and conditions. Violations of that humanity offended his unshakable conviction that mankind is possessed of the divinity of God." It was Hughes’s belief in humanity and his hope for a world in which people could sanely and with understanding live together that led to his decline in popularity in the racially turbulent latter years of his life. Unlike younger and more militant writers, Hughes never lost his conviction that “ most  people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been.” Reviewing  The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times  in  Poetry,  Laurence Lieberman recognized that Hughes’s “sensibility [had] kept pace with the times,” but he criticized his lack of a personal political stance. “Regrettably, in different poems, he is fatally prone to sympathize with starkly antithetical politics of race,” Lieberman commented. “A reader can appreciate his catholicity, his tolerance of all the rival—and mutually hostile—views of his outspoken compatriots, from Martin Luther King to Stokely Carmichael, but we are tempted to ask, what are Hughes’ politics? And if he has none, why not? The age demands intellectual commitment from its spokesmen. A poetry whose chief claim on our attention is moral, rather than aesthetic, must take sides politically.” Hughes’s position in the American literary scene seems to be secure. David Littlejohn wrote that Hughes is "the one sure Negro classic, more certain of permanence than even Baldwin or Ellison or Wright. … His voice is as sure, his manner as original, his position as secure as, say Edwin Arlington Robinson’s or Robinson Jeffers’. … By molding his verse always on the sounds of Negro talk, the rhythms of Negro music, by retaining his own keen honesty and directness, his poetic sense and ironic intelligence, he maintained through four decades a readable newness distinctly his own."

The Block  and  The Sweet and Sour Animal Book  are posthumously published collections of Hughes’s poetry for children that position his words against a backdrop of visual art.  The Block  pairs Hughes’s poems with a series of six collages by Romare Bearden that bear the book’s title.  The Sweet and Sour Animal Book  contains previously unpublished and repeatedly rejected poetry of Hughes from the 1930s. Here, the editors have combined it with the artwork of elementary school children at the Harlem School of the Arts. The results, noted Veronica Chambers in the  New York Times Book Review,  “reflect Hughes’s childlike wonder as well as his sense of humor.” Chambers also commented on the rhythms of Hughes’s words, noting that “children love a good rhyme” and that Hughes gave them “just a simple but seductive taste of the blues.” Hughes’s poems have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Russian, Yiddish, and Czech; many of them have been set to music. Donald B. Gibson noted in the introduction to  Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays  that Hughes

has perhaps the greatest reputation (worldwide) that any black writer has ever had. Hughes differed from most of his predecessors among black poets, and (until recently) from those who followed him as well, in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read. He has been, unlike most nonblack poets other than  Walt Whitman , Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg, a poet of the people. …  Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously—though always seriously—to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet.

Hughes died on May 22, 1967, due to complications from prostate cancer.

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Black maria, blues in stereo, blues on a box, boogie: 1 a.m., brass spittoons, crossing jordan, crowing hen blues, daybreak in alabama, dream boogie, dream boogie: variation, dying beast, easy boogie, flatted fifths  , folks who knock at madam's door, harlem sweeties, i look at the world, lady’s boogie  , let america be america again, lincoln theatre, love again blues, lover's return, madam’s past history, morning after, mother to son, the negro speaks of rivers, out of work, po' boy blues, seashore through dark glasses, southern mammy sings, suicide's note, sylvester’s dying bed, theme for english b, the weary blues, who but the lord, winter moon, yesterday and today, you and your whole race., 200 years of afro-american poetry, jazz as communication, the negro artist and the racial mountain, too long, too cute, two good.

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POETRY (Published by Knopf, except as indicated)

• The Weary Blues, 1926.
• Fine Clothes to the Jew, 1927.
• The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations, Golden Stair Press, 1931.
• Dear Lovely Death, Troutbeck Press, 1931.
• The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, 1932.
• Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play, Golden Stair Press, 1932.
• A New Song, International Workers Order, 1938.
• (With Robert Glenn) Shakespeare in Harlem, 1942.
• Jim Crow's Last Stand, Negro Publication Society of America, 1943.
• Freedom's Plow, Musette Publishers, 1943.
• Lament for Dark Peoples and Other Poems, Holland, 1944.
• Fields of Wonder, 1947.
• One-Way Ticket, 1949.
• Montage of a Dream Deferred, Holt, 1951.
• Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz, 1961.
• The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times, 1967, reprinted, Vintage Books, 1992.
• The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Knopf (New York, NY), 1994.
• The Block: Poems, Viking (New York, NY), 1995.
• Carol of the Brown King: Poems, Atheneum Books (New York, NY), 1997.
• The Pasteboard Bandit, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1997.
• Not Without Laughter, Knopf, 1930.
• Tambourines to Glory, John Day, 1958.

SHORT STORIES

• The Ways of White Folks, Knopf, 1934.
• Simple Speaks His Mind, Simon & Schuster, 1950.
• Laughing to Keep from Crying, Holt, 1952.
• Simple Takes a Wife, Simon & Schuster, 1953.
• Simple Stakes a Claim, Rinehart, 1957.
• Something in Common and Other Stories, Hill & Wang, 1963.
• Simple's Uncle Sam, Hill & Wang, 1965.
• The Return of Simple Hill & Wang, 1994.
• Short Stories of Langston Hughes, Hill & Wang (New York, NY), 1996.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

• The Big Sea: An Autobiography, Knopf, 1940.
• I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey, Rinehart, 1956.
• A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1934.
• (With Roy De Carava) The Sweet Flypaper of Life, Simon & Schuster, 1955.
• (With Milton Meltzer) A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, Crown, 1956, 4th edition published as A Pictorial History of Black Americans, 1973, 6th edition published as A Pictorial History of African Americans, 1995.
• Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP, Norton, 1962.
• (With Meltzer) Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment, Prentice-Hall, 1967.
• Black Misery, Paul S. Erickson, 1969.
• (With Arna Bontemps) Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti, Macmillan, 1932.
• The First Book of Negroes, F. Watts, 1952.
• The First Book of Rhythms, F. Watts, 1954, also published as The Book of Rhythms, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995.
• Famous American Negroes, Dodd, 1954.
• Famous Negro Music Makers, Dodd, 1955.
• The First Book of Jazz, F. Watts, 1955, revised edition, 1976.
• The First Book of the West Indies, F. Watts, 1956 (published in England as The First Book of the Caribbean, E. Ward, 1965).
• Famous Negro Heroes of America, Dodd, 1958.
• The First Book of Africa, F. Watts, 1960, revised edition, 1964.
• The Sweet and Sour Animal Book, Oxford University Press (New York City), 1994.
• Four Lincoln University Poets, Lincoln University, 1930.
• (With Bontemps) The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949, Doubleday, 1949, revised edition published as The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1970, 1970.
• (With Waring Cuney and Bruce M. Wright) Lincoln University Poets, Fine Editions, 1954.
• (With Bontemps) The Book of Negro Folklore, Dodd, 1958.
• An African Treasury: Articles, Essays, Stories, Poems by Black Africans, Crown, 1960.
• Poems from Black Africa, Indiana University Press, 1963.
• New Negro Poets: U.S., foreword by Gwendolyn Brooks, Indiana University Press, 1964.
• The Book of Negro Humor, Dodd, 1966.
• The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers: An Anthology from 1899 to the Present, Little, Brown, 1967.
• (With Mercer Cook) Jacques Roumain, Masters of Dew, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947, second edition, Liberty Book Club, 1957.
• (With Frederic Carruthers) Nicolas Guillen, Cuba Libre, Ward Ritchie, 1948.
• Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, Indiana University Press, 1957.

OMNIBUS VOLUMES

• Selected Poems, Knopf, 1959.
• The Best of Simple, Hill & Wang, 1961.
• Five Plays by Langston Hughes, edited by Webster Smalley, Indiana University Press, 1963.
• The Langston Hughes Reader, Braziller, 1968.
• Don't You Turn Back (poems), edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins, Knopf, 1969.
• Good Morning Revolution: The Uncollected Social Protest Writing of Langston Hughes, edited by Faith Berry, Lawrence Hill, 1973.
• The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Knopf, 1994.
• The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (18 volumes), University of Missouri Press, 2001, 2002.
• (With Bontemps) Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters: 1925-1967, edited by Charles H. Nichols, Dodd, 1980.
• (With Zora Neale Hurston) Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (play), HarperCollins, 1991.
• Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942-62, edited by Christopher C. De Santis, University of Illinois Press, 1995.
• Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964, edited by Emily Bernard, Knopf, 2001.

Author of numerous plays (most have been produced), including Little Ham, 1935, Mulatto, 1935, Emperor of Haiti, 1936, Troubled Island, 1936, When the Jack Hollers, 1936, Front Porch, 1937, Joy to My Soul, 1937, Soul Gone Home, 1937, Little Eva's End, 1938, Limitations of Life, 1938, The Em-Fuehrer Jones, 1938, Don't You Want to Be Free, 1938, The Organizer, 1939, The Sun Do Move, 1942, For This We Fight, 1943, The Barrier, 1950, The Glory round His Head, 1953, Simply Heavenly, 1957, Esther, 1957, The Ballad of the Brown King, 1960, Black Nativity, 1961, Gospel Glow, 1962, Jericho-Jim Crow, 1963, Tambourines to Glory, 1963, The Prodigal Son, 1965, Soul Yesterday and Today, Angelo Herndon Jones, Mother and Child, Trouble with the Angels, and Outshines the Sun. Also author of screenplay, Way Down South, 1942. Author of libretto for operas, The Barrier, 1950, and Troubled Island. Lyricist for Just around the Corner, and for Kurt Weill's Street Scene, 1948. Columnist for Chicago Defender and New York Post. Poetry, short stories, criticism, and plays have been included in numerous anthologies. Contributor to periodicals, including Nation, African Forum, Black Drama, Players Magazine, Negro Digest, Black World, Freedomways, Harlem Quarterly, Phylon, Challenge, Negro Quarterly, and Negro Story. Some of Hughes's letters, manuscripts, lecture notes, periodical clippings, and pamphlets are included in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Additional materials are in the Schomburg Collection of the New York Public Library, the library of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and the Fisk University library.

Further Readings

• Baker, Houston A., Jr., Black Literature in America, McGraw, 1971.
• Berry, Faith, Langston Hughes, Before and Beyond Harlem, Wings Books (New York, NY), 1995.
• Berry, S. L., Langston Hughes, Creative Education (Mankato, MN), 1994.
• Black Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992.
• Bone, Robert A., The Negro Novel in America, Yale University Press, 1965.
• Bonner, Pat E., Sassy Jazz and Slo' Draggin' Blues: Music in the Poetry of Langston Hughes, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1996.
• Children's Literature Review, Volume 17, Gale, 1989.
• Concise Dictionary of Literary Biography: The Age of Maturity, 1929-1941, Gale, 1989.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 1, 1973, Volume 5, 1976, Volume 10, 1979, Volume 15, 1980, Volume 35, 1985, Volume 44, 1987.
• Cooper, Floyd, Coming Home: From the Life of Langston Hughes, Philomel Books (New York, NY), 1994.
• (Dace, Tish, editor) Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1997.
• Davis, Arthur P., and Saunders Redding, editors, Cavalcade, Houghton, 1971.
• Dekle, Bernard, Profiles of Modern American Authors, Charles E. Tuttle, 1969.
• Dickinson, Donald C., A Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes, 1902-1967, Archon Books, 1967.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 4: American Writers in Paris, 1920-1939, 1980, Volume 7: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, 1981, Volume 48: American Poets, 1880-1945, Second Series, 1986, Volume 51: Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940, 1987.
• Dunham, Montrew, Langston Hughes: Young Black Poet, Aladdin (New York City), 1995.
• Emanuel, James, Langston Hughes, Twayne, 1967.
• Gibson, Donald B., editor, Five Black Writers, New York University Press, 1970.
• Gibson, Donald B., editor and author of introduction, Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, 1973.
• Harper, Donna Sullivan, Not So Simple: The "Simple" Stories by Langston Hughes, University of Missouri Press (Columbia), 1995.
• Hart, W., editor, American Writers' Congress, International, 1935.
• Hill, Christine, H., Langston Hughes: Poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Hanslow Pub. (Springfield, NJ), 1997.
• Hughes, Langston, The Big Sea: An Autobiography, Knopf, 1940.
• Hughes, Langston, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey, Rinehart, 1956.
• Jackson, Blyden, and Louis D. Rubin Jr., Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in Historical Interpretation, Louisiana State University, 1974.
• Jahn, Janheinz, A Bibliography of Neo-African Literature from Africa, America and the Caribbean, Praeger, 1965.
• Littlejohn, David, Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes, Viking, 1966.
• McLaren, Joseph, Langston Hughes, Folk Dramatist in the Protest Tradition, 1921-1943, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1996.
• Meltzer, Milton, Langston Hughes: A Biography, Crowell, 1968.
• Myers, Elizabeth P., Langston Hughes: Poet of His People, Garrard, 1970.
• Nazel, Joseph, Langston Hughes, Melrose Square (Los Angeles), 1994.
• Neilson, Kenneth, To Langston Hughes, with Love, All Seasons Art (Hollis, NY), 1996.
• O'Daniel, Thermon B., editor, Langston Hughes: Black Genius, a Critical Evaluation, Morrow, 1971.
• Osofsky, Audrey, Free to Dream: The Making of a Poet, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books (New York, NY), 1996.
• Rollins, Charlamae H., Black Troubador: Langston Hughes, Rand McNally, 1970.
• Trotman, C. James, Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence, Garland (New York, NY), 1995.
• Walker, Alice, Langston Hughes, American Poet, HarperCollins (New York City), 1988.

PERIODICALS

• African American Review, fall, 1994, p. 333.
• American Mercury, January, 1959.
• Black Scholar, June, 1971; July, 1976.
• Black World, June, 1970; September, 1972; September, 1973.
• Booklist, November 15, 1976; January 1, 1991, p. 889.
• Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, January, 1995, p. 168; January, 1996, p. 162.
• CLA Journal, June, 1972.
• Choice, February 1996, p. 951.
• Crisis, August-September, 1960; June, 1967; February, 1969.
• Ebony, October, 1946.
• Emerge, May, 1995, p. 58.
• English Journal, March, 1977.
• Horn Book, September-October, 1994, p. 603; January-February, 1996, p. 86.
• Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 1994, p. 578.
• Library Journal, February 1, 1991, p. 78.
• Life, February 4, 1966.
• Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 26, 1995, p. 1.
• Nation, December 4, 1967.
• Negro American Literature Forum, winter, 1971.
• Negro Digest, September, 1967; November, 1967; April, 1969.
• New Leader, April 10, 1967.
• New Republic, January 14, 1974; March 6, 1995, p. 37.
• New Yorker, December 30, 1967.
• New York Herald Tribune, August 1, 1926.
• New York Herald Tribune Books, November 26, 1961.
• New York Times, May 24, 1967; June 1, 1968; June 29, 1969; December 13, 1970; February 8, 1995, p. C17.
• New York Times Book Review, November 3, 1968; December 25, 1994, p. 15; February 12, 1995, p. 18; November 12, 1995, p. 38.
• Philadelphia Tribune, February 5, 1927.
• Poetry, August, 1968.
• Publishers Weekly, May 9, 1994, p. 62; October 3, 1994, p. 30; October 31, 1994, p.54; November 13, 1995, p. 60.
• San Francisco Chronicle, April 5, 1959.
• Saturday Review, November 22, 1958; September 29, 1962.
• School Library Journal, February, 1995, p. 92.
• Smithsonian, August, 1994, p. 49.
• Tribune Book's (Chicago), April 13, 1980.
• Washington Post, November 13, 1978.
• Washington Post Book World, February 2, 1969; December 8, 1985.
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Langston Hughes Biography

Born: February 1, 1902 Joplin, Missouri Died: May 22, 1967 New York, New York African American poet and playwright

American author Langston Hughes, a moving spirit in the artistic movement of the 1920s often called the Harlem Renaissance, expressed the mind and spirit of most African Americans for nearly half a century.

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902, to Carrie M. Langston and James N. Hughes. His parents separated soon after his birth, and Hughes was raised mainly by his mother, his grandmother, and a childless couple, the Reeds. He attended public schools in Kansas and Illinois and upon graduating elementary school, Hughes was named class poet, although he had never even written a poem. That title sparked an interest in writing poetry.

Hughes graduated from high school in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1920. His high school companions, most of whom were white, remembered him as a handsome "Indian-looking" youth whom everyone liked and respected for his quiet, natural ways and his abilities. He won an athletic letter in track and held offices in the student council and the American Civic Association.

In high school Hughes was introduced to the works of poet Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), another poet from the Midwest. Also at this time, Hughes himself began writing poetry and developing his unique style. He began submitting his work to magazines, but all were rejected.

A career begins

Hughes spent the year after high school in Mexico with his father, who tried to discourage him from writing. But Hughes's poetry and prose (writings) were beginning to appear in the Brownie's Book, a publication for children edited by W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), and he was starting work on more ambitious material for adult readers. The poem "A Negro Speaks of River," which marked this development, appeared in the Crisis magazine in 1921.

Later in 1924 Hughes went to live with his mother in Washington, D.C. He hoped to earn enough money to return to college, but work as a hotel busboy paid very little, and life in the nation's capital, where racial tensions were fierce, made him unhappy. But he was able to write many poems. "The Weary Blues" won first prize in 1925 in a literary competition sponsored by Opportunity, a magazine published by the National Urban League. That summer one of his essays and another poem won prizes in the Crisis literary contest. Meanwhile, Hughes had come to the attention of Carl Van Vechten, a novelist and critic, who arranged publication of Hughes's first volume of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926).

This book projected Hughes's lasting themes, established his style, and suggested the wide range of his poetic talent. It showed him committed to racial themes—pride in blackness and in his African heritage, and the everyday life of African Americans—and democracy (government ruled by the people) and patriotism (the support of one's country). Hughes transformed the bitterness which such themes generated in many African Americans of the day into sharp irony and humor. His casual, folklike style was strengthened in his second book, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927).

A literary success

Hughes had resumed his education in 1925 and graduated from Lincoln University in 1929. Not without Laughter (1930) was his first novel. The story portrays an African American boy, Sandy, caught between two worlds and two attitudes. The boy's hardworking and respectable mother provides a counterpoint to his energetic, easygoing, footloose father. The mother is oriented to the middle-class values of the white world; the father believes that fun and laughter are the only things worth pursuing. Though the boy's character is blurred, Hughes's attention to the details of African American culture in America gives the novel insight and power.

The relative commercial success of Not without Laughter inspired Hughes to make his living as an author. In 1931 he made the first of what became annual lecture tours. The following year he took a trip to the Soviet Union, the former country that today consists of Russia and other smaller nations. Meanwhile, he turned out poems, essays, book reviews, song lyrics, plays, and short stories. He edited five books of African American writing and worked with Arna Bontemps on another and on a book for children. He wrote some twenty plays, including "Mulatto," "Simply Heavenly," and "Tambourines to Glory." He translated Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet, and Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957), the Latin American Nobel laureate poet, and wrote two long autobiographical works (a biography about oneself).

As a newspaper columnist for the Chicago Defender, Hughes created "Simple." This enduring character brought his style to perfection and solidified his reputation as the "most eloquent [fluent and persuasive] spokesman" for African Americans. The sketches of Simple, collected in five volumes, are presented as conversations between an uneducated, African American city dweller, Jesse B. Semple (Simple), and an educated but less sensitive African American friend. The sketches that ran in the Defender for twenty-five years are varied in subject and remarkable in their relevance to the universal human condition. That Simple is a universal man, even though his language, habits, and personality are the result of his particular experiences as an African American man, is a measure of Hughes's genius.

Hughes received numerous fellowships (scholarships), awards, and honorary degrees, including the Anisfield-Wolf Award (1953) for a book on improving race relations. He taught creative writing at two universities; had his plays produced on four continents; and made recordings of African American history, music commentary, and his own poetry. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His work, some of which was translated into a dozen languages, earned him an international reputation. Forty-seven volumes bear Hughes's name. He died in New York City on May 22, 1967.

For More Information

Cooper, Floyd. Coming Home: From the Life of Langston Hughes. New York: Philomel Books, 1994.

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940. Reprint, New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Hughes, Langston. I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey. New York: Rinehart, 1956. Reprint, New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Meltzer, Milton. Langston Hughes: A Biography. New York: Crowell, 1968.

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Walker, Alice. Langston Hughes, American Poet. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.

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Langston Hughes

By: History.com Editors

Updated: December 15, 2023 | Original: January 24, 2023

Langston Hughes was a defining figure of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance  as an influential poet, playwright, novelist, short story writer, essayist, political commentator and social activist. Known as a poet of the people, his work focused on the everyday lives of the Black working class, earning him renown as one of America’s most notable poets.

Hughes was born February 1, 1902 (although some evidence shows it may have been 1901 ), in Joplin, Missouri, to James and Caroline Hughes. When he was a young boy, his parents divorced, and, after his father moved to Mexico, and his mother, whose maiden name was Langston, sought work elsewhere, he was raised by his grandmother, Mary Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas. Mary Langston died when Hughes was around 12 years old, and he relocated to Illinois to live with his mother and stepfather. The family eventually landed in Cleveland.

According to the first volume of his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea , which chronicled his life until the age of 28, Hughes said he often used reading to combat loneliness while growing up. “I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas,” he wrote.

In his Ohio high school, he started writing poetry, focusing on what he called “low-down folks” and the Black American experience. He would later write that he was influenced at a young age by Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico to live with his father for a year. It was during this period that, still a teenager, he wrote “ The Negro Speaks of Rivers ,” a free-verse poem that ran in the NAACP ’s The Crisis magazine and garnered him acclaim. It read, in part:

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

Traveling the World

Hughes returned from Mexico and spent one year studying at Columbia University in New York City . He didn’t love the experience, citing racism, but he became immersed in the burgeoning Harlem cultural and intellectual scene, a period now known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes worked several jobs over the next several years, including cook, elevator operator and laundry hand. He was employed as a steward on a ship, traveling to Africa and Europe, and lived in Paris, mingling with the expat artist community there, before returning to America and settling down in Washington, D.C. It was in the nation’s capital that, while working as a busboy, he slipped his poetry to the noted poet Vachel Lindsay, cited as the father of modern singing poetry, who helped connect Hughes to the literary world.

Hughes’ first book of poetry, The Weary Blues was published in 1926, and he received a scholarship to and, in 1929, graduated from, Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University. He soon published Not Without Laughter , his first novel, which was awarded the Harmon Gold Medal for literature.

Jazz Poetry

Called the “Poet Laureate of Harlem,” he is credited as the father of jazz poetry, a literary genre influenced by or sounding like jazz, with rhythms and phrases inspired by the music.

“But jazz to me is 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, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile,” he wrote in the 1926 essay, “ The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain .”

Writing for a general audience, his subject matter continued to focus on ordinary Black Americans. Hughes wrote that his 1927 work, “Fine Clothes to the Jew,” was about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago—people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July."

He also did not shy from writing about his experiences and observations.

“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” he wrote in the The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain . “If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.”

Ever the traveler, Hughes spent time in the South, chronicling racial injustices, and also the Soviet Union in the 1930s, showing an interest in communism . (He was called to testify before Congress during the McCarthy hearings in 1953.)

In 1930, Hughes wrote “Mule Bone” with Zora Neale Hurston , his first play, which would be the first of many. “Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South,” about race issues, was Broadway’s longest-running play written by a Black author until Lorraine Hansberry’s 1958 play, “A Raisin in the Sun.” Hansberry based the name of her play on Hughes’ 1951 poem, “ Harlem ” in which he writes, 

"What happens to a dream deferred?

                Does it dry up

                like a raisin in the sun?...”

Hughes wrote the lyrics for “Street Scene,” a 1947 Broadway musical, and set up residence in a Harlem brownstone on East 127th Street. He co-founded the New York Suitcase Theater, as well as theater troupes in Los Angeles and Chicago. He attempted screenwriting in Hollywood, but found racism blocked his efforts.

He worked as a newspaper war correspondent in 1937 for the Baltimore Afro American , writing about Black American soldiers fighting for the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War . He also wrote a column from 1942-1962 for the Chicago Defender , a Black newspaper, focusing on Jim Crow laws and segregation , World War II and the treatment of Black people in America. The column often featured the fictitious Jesse B. Semple, known as Simple.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Hughes wrote a “First Book” series of children's books, patriotic stories about Black culture and achievements, including The First Book of Negroes (1952), The First Book of Jazz (1955), and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958). Among the stories in the 1958 volume is "Thank You, Ma'am," in which a young teenage boy learns a lesson about trust and respect when an older woman he tries to rob ends up taking him home and giving him a meal.

Hughes died in New York from complications during surgery to treat prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, at the age of 65. His ashes are interred in Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His Harlem home was named a New York landmark in 1981, and a National Register of Places a year later. 

"I, too, am America," a quote from his 1926 poem, " I, too, " is engraved on the wall of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

“ Langston Hughes ,” The Library of Congress

“ Langston Hughes: The People's Poet ,” Smithsonian Magazine

“ The Blues and Langston Hughes ,” Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

“ Langston Hughes ,” Poets.org

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Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes’s birth year was revised from 1902 to 1901 after new research from 2018 uncovered that he had been born a year earlier. His parents, James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Langston Hughes, divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his maternal grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston, who was nearly seventy when Hughes was born, until he was thirteen. He then moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland. It was in Lincoln that Hughes began writing poetry.

After graduating from high school, he spent a year in Mexico followed by a year at Columbia University. During this time, he worked as an assistant cook, a launderer, and a busboy. He also traveled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues , (Knopf, 1926) was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926 with an introduction by Harlem Renaissance arts patron Carl Van Vechten . Criticism of the book from the time varied, with some praising the arrival of a significant new voice in poetry, while others dismissed Hughes’s debut collection. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter (Knopf, 1930), won the Harmon gold medal for literature.

Hughes, who cited Paul Laurence Dunbar , Carl Sandburg , and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful portrayals of Black life in America from the 1920s to the 1960s. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951). His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable Black poets of the period, such as Claude McKay , Jean Toomer , and Countee Cullen , Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of Black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including their love of music, laughter, and language, alongside their suffering.

The critic Donald B. Gibson noted in the introduction to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice Hall, 1973) that Hughes

differed from most of his predecessors among black poets… in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read... Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously—though always seriously—to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet.

In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic work, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known “Simple” books: Simple’s Uncle Sam (Hill and Wang, 1965);  Simple Stakes a Claim  (Rinehart, 1957);  Simple Takes a Wife  (Simon & Schuster, 1953);  Simple Speaks His Mind  (Simon & Schuster, 1950). He coedited the The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949  (Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1949) with Arna Bontemps , edited The Book of Negro Folklore (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1958), and wrote an acclaimed autobiography, The Big Sea (Knopf, 1940). Hughes also cowrote the play Mule Bone (HarperCollins, 1991) with Zora Neale Hurston.

Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, in New York City. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed “Langston Hughes Place.”

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James Weldon Johnson, born in Florida in 1871, was a national organizer for the NAACP and an author of poetry and nonfiction. Perhaps best known for the song "Lift Every Voice and SIng," he also wrote several poetry collections and novels, often exploring racial identity and the African American folk tradition.

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Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes (1901–1967) was a poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, columnist, and a significant figure of the Harlem Renaissance. 

Born in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes was the descendant of enslaved African American women and white slave owners in Kentucky. He attended high school in Cleveland, Ohio, where he wrote his first poetry, short stories, and dramatic plays. After a short time in New York, he spent the early 1920s traveling through West Africa and Europe, living in Paris and England.

Hughes returned to the United States in 1924 and to Harlem after graduating from Lincoln University in 1929. His first poem was published in 1921 in The Crisis and he published his first book of poetry, T he Weary Blues in 1926. Hughes’s influential work focused on a racial consciousness devoid of hate. In 1926, he published what would be considered a manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance in The Nation : “The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.”

Portrait of Langston Hughes , ca. 1960.

Photograph by Louis H. Draper

Hughes penned novels, short stories, plays, operas, essays, works for children, and an autobiography. Hughes’s sexuality is debated by scholars, with some finding homosexual codes and unpublished poems to an alleged black male lover to indicate he was homosexual. His primary biographer, Arnold Rampersad, notes that Hughes exhibited a preference for African American men in his work and his life, but was likely asexual.

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Langston Hughes: Facts & Related Content

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Did You Know?

• At Columbia, Hughes studied Engineering and Chemistry because his father wanted him to study a subject more lucrative than writing.
• Senator Joseph McCarthy accused Langston Hughes of being a Communist and forced him to testify in Washington, D.C.
• Langston Hughes temporarily worked as a cook in Paris.

Related Topics and References

• African American literature: Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen

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Biography of Langston Hughes, Poet, Key Figure in Harlem Renaissance

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Langston Hughes was a singular voice in American poetry, writing with vivid imagery and jazz-influenced rhythms about the everyday Black experience in the United States. While best-known for his modern, free-form poetry with superficial simplicity masking deeper symbolism, Hughes worked in fiction, drama, and film as well.

Hughes purposefully mixed his own personal experiences into his work, setting him apart from other major Black poets of the era, and placing him at the forefront of the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance . From the early 1920s to the late 1930s, this explosion of poetry and other work by Black Americans profoundly changed the artistic landscape of the country and continues to influence writers to this day.

Fast Facts: Langston Hughes

• Full Name: James Mercer Langston Hughes
• Known For: Poet, novelist, journalist, activist
• Born: February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri
• Parents: James and Caroline Hughes (née Langston)
• Died: May 22, 1967 in New York, New York
• Education: Lincoln University of Pennsylvania
• Selected Works: The Weary Blues, The Ways of White Folks, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Montage of a Dream Deferred
•  Notable Quote: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

Early Years

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. His father divorced his mother shortly thereafter and left them to travel. As a result of the split, he was primarily raised by his grandmother, Mary Langston, who had a strong influence on Hughes, educating him in the oral traditions of his people and impressing upon him a sense of pride; she was referred to often in his poems. After Mary Langston died, Hughes moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her new husband. He began writing poetry shortly after enrolling in high school.

Hughes moved to Mexico in 1919 to live with his father for a short time. In 1920, Hughes graduated high school and returned to Mexico. He wished to attend Columbia University in New York and lobbied his father for financial assistance; his father did not think writing was a good career, and offered to pay for college only if Hughes studied engineering. Hughes attended Columbia University in 1921 and did well, but found the racism he encountered there to be corrosive—though the surrounding Harlem neighborhood was inspiring to him. His affection for Harlem remained strong for the rest of his life. He left Columbia after one year, worked a series of odd jobs, and traveled to Africa working as a crewman on a boat, and from there on to Paris. There he became part of the Black expatriate community of artists.

The Crisis to Fine Clothes to the Jew (1921-1930)

• The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921)
• The Weary Blues (1926)
• The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926)
• Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927)
• Not Without Laughter (1930)

Hughes wrote his poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers while still in high school, and published it in The Crisis , the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The poem gained Hughes a great deal of attention; influenced by Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, it is a tribute to Black people throughout history in a free verse format:

I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Hughes began to publish poems on a regular basis, and in 1925 won the Poetry Prize from Opportunity Magazine . Fellow writer Carl Van Vechten, who Hughes had met on his overseas travels, sent Hughes’ work to Alfred A. Knopf, who enthusiastically published Hughes’ first collection of poetry, The Weary Blues in 1926.

Around the same time, Hughes took advantage of his job as a busboy in a Washington, D.C., hotel to give several poems to poet Vachel Lindsay, who began to champion Hughes in the mainstream media of the time, claiming to have discovered him. Based on these literary successes, Hughes received a scholarship to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and published The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain in The Nation . The piece was a manifesto calling for more Black artists to produce Black-centric art without worrying whether white audiences would appreciate it—or approve of it.

In 1927, Hughes published his second collection of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1929. In 1930, Hughes published Not Without Laughter , which is sometimes described as a "prose poem" and sometimes as a novel, signaling his continued evolution and his impending experiments outside of poetry.

By this point, Hughes was firmly established as a leading light in what is known as the Harlem Renaissance. The literary movement celebrated Black art and culture as public interest in the subject soared.

Fiction, Film, and Theater Work (1931-1949)

• The Ways of White Folks (1934)
• Mulatto (1935)
• Way Down South (1935)
• The Big Sea (1940)

Hughes traveled through the American South in 1931 and his work became more forcefully political, as he became increasingly aware of the racial injustices of the time. Always sympathetic to communist political theory, seeing it as an alternative to the implicit racism of capitalism, he also traveled extensively through the Soviet Union during the 1930s.

He published his first collection of short fiction, The Ways of White Folks , in 1934. The story cycle is marked by a certain pessimism in regards to race relations; Hughes seems to suggest in these stories that there will never be a time without racism in this country. His play Mulatto , first staged in 1935, deals with many of the same themes as the most famous story in the collection, Cora Unashamed , which tells the story of a Black servant who develops a close emotional bond with the young white daughter of her employers.

Hughes became increasingly interested in the theater, and founded the New York Suitcase Theater with Paul Peters in 1931. After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935, he also co-founded a theater troupe in Los Angeles while co-writing the screenplay for the film Way Down South . Hughes imagined he would be an in-demand screenwriter in Hollywood; his failure to gain much success in the industry was put down to racism. He wrote and published his autobiography The Big Sea in 1940 despite being only 28 years old; the chapter titled Black Renaissance discussed the literary movement in Harlem and inspired the name "Harlem Renaissance."

Continuing his interest in theater, Hughes founded the Skyloft Players in Chicago in 1941 and began writing a regular column for the Chicago Defender , which he would continue to write for two decades. After World War II and the Civil Rights Movement ’s rise and successes, Hughes found that the younger generation of Black artists, coming into a world where segregation was ending and real progress seemed possible in terms of race relations and the Black experience, saw him as a relic of the past. His style of writing and Black-centric subject matter seemed passé .

Children’s Books and Later Work (1950-1967)

• Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)
• The First Book of the Negroes (1952)
• I Wonder as I Wander (1956)
• A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (1956)
• The Book of Negro Folklore (1958)

Hughes attempted to interact with the new generation of Black artists by directly addressing them, but rejecting what he saw as their vulgarity and over-intellectual approach. His epic poem "suite," Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) took inspiration from jazz music, collecting a series of related poems sharing the overarching theme of a "dream deferred" into something akin to a film montage—a series of images and short poems following quickly after each other in order to position references and symbolism together. The most famous section from the larger poem is the most direct and powerful statement of the theme, known as Harlem :

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode ?

In 1956, Hughes published his second autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander . He took a greater interest in documenting the cultural history of Black America, producing A Pictorial History of the Negro in America in 1956, and editing The Book of Negro Folklore in 1958.

Hughes continued to work throughout the 1960s and was considered by many to be the leading writer of Black America at the time, although none of his works after Montage of a Dream Deferred approached the power and clarity of his work during his prime.

Although Hughes had previously published a book for children in 1932 ( Popo and Fifina ), in the 1950s he began publishing books specifically for children regularly, including his First Book series, which was designed to instill a sense of pride in and respect for the cultural achievements of African Americans in its youth. The series included The First Book of the Negroes (1952), The First Book of Jazz (1954), The First Book of Rhythms (1954), The First Book of the West Indies (1956), and The First Book of Africa (1964).

The tone of these children’s books was perceived as very patriotic as well as focused on the appreciation of Black culture and history. Many people, aware of Hughes’ flirtations with communism and his run-in with Senator McCarthy , suspected he attempted to make his children’s books self-consciously patriotic in order to combat any perception that he might not be a loyal citizen.

Personal Life

While Hughes reportedly had several affairs with women during his life, he never married or had children. Theories concerning his sexual orientation abound; many believe that Hughes, known for strong affections for Black men in his life, seeded clues about his homosexuality throughout his poems (something Walt Whitman, one of his key influences, was known to do in his own work). However, there is no overt evidence to support this, and some argue that Hughes was, if anything, asexual and uninterested in sex.

Despite his early and long-term interest in socialism and his visit to the Soviet Union, Hughes denied being a communist when called to testify by Senator Joseph McCarthy. He then distanced himself from communism and socialism, and was thus estranged from the political left that had often supported him. His work dealt less and less with political considerations after the mid-1950s as a result, and when he compiled the poems for his 1959 collection Selected Poems, he excluded most of his more politically-focused work from his youth.

Hughes was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and entered the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City on May 22, 1967 to undergo surgery to treat the disease. Complications arose during the procedure, and Hughes passed away at the age of 65. He was cremated, and his ashes interred in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, where the floor bears a design based on his poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers , including a line from the poem inscribed on the floor.

Hughes turned his poetry outward at a time in the early 20th century when Black artists were increasingly turning inward, writing for an insular audience. Hughes wrote about Black history and the Black experience, but he wrote for a general audience, seeking to convey his ideas in emotional, easily-understood motifs and phrases that nevertheless had power and subtlety behind them.

Hughes incorporated the rhythms of modern speech in Black neighborhoods and of jazz and blues music, and he included characters of "low" morals in his poems, including alcoholics, gamblers, and prostitutes, whereas most Black literature sought to disavow such characters because of a fear of proving some of the worst racist assumptions. Hughes felt strongly that showing all aspects of Black culture was part of reflecting life and refused to apologize for what he called the "indelicate" nature of his writing.

• Als, Hilton. “The Elusive Langston Hughes.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 9 July 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/sojourner.
• Ward, David C. “Why Langston Hughes Still Reigns as a Poet for the Unchampioned.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 22 May 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/why-langston-hughes-still-reigns-poet-unchampioned-180963405/.
• Johnson, Marisa, et al. “Women in the Life of Langston Hughes.” US History Scene, http://ushistoryscene.com/article/women-and-hughes/.
• McKinney, Kelsey. “Langston Hughes Wrote a Children's Book in 1955.” Vox, Vox, 2 Apr. 2015, https://www.vox.com/2015/4/2/8335251/langston-hughes-jazz-book.
• Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/poet/langston-hughes.
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Langston Hughes Biography

Birthday: February 1 , 1901 ( Aquarius )

Born In: Joplin, Missouri, United States

James Mercer Langston Hughes is remembered as one of the greatest contributorsto the artistic realm of the Harlem Renaissance. A poet and writer by profession, Hughes was an African-American. Through his exquisite literary compositions, he told stories of the sufferings and the life of the black people. During the 1920s when writers chose to stream their content, making their compositions worthy of only the highly literate, Hughes’ writings came as an elementary relief to those who could just about read and didn’t possess opulent knowledge. His poetry was straight forward and often meant for the black community. He had a particular penchant for jazz music. In fact, he created a brand new genre of American poetry that was later called jazz poetry. Gaining support for his work, he went on to write short stories, plays and columns. It was his dauntless ability to express the black life with all its honesty that won him plenty of admiration later in his career. The columns he wrote largely uplifted the morale of the blacks who were subjugated to racism. His famous work ‘When Harlem was in Vogue’ received plaudits from sundry writers.

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Also Known As: James Mercer Langston Hughes

Died At Age: 66

father: James Nathaniel Hughes

mother: Carrie (Caroline) Mercer Langston

Born Country: United States

Quotes By Langston Hughes Poets

political ideology: Communism

Died on: May 22 , 1967

place of death: New York City, New York,, United States

Diseases & Disabilities: Prostate Cancer

Ancestry: French American, British American

Cause of Death: Abdominal Surgery

U.S. State: Missouri

education: Columbia University, Lincoln University

awards: Hughes won the Witter Bynner Undergraduate Poetry Prize. Hughes was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship which allowed him to travel to Spain and Russia.

Hughes was awarded a felowship from the Rosenwald Fund. Lincoln University awarded Hughes an honorary Litt.D. Hughes won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. the NAACP awarded Hughes the Spingarn Medal Howard University awarded Hughes an honorary doctorate. Western Reserve University awarded Hughes an honorary Litt.D. The first Langston Hughes Medal was awarded by the City College of New York.

You wanted to know

What impact did langston hughes have on the harlem renaissance.

Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural and artistic movement of the 1920s and 1930s that celebrated African American art and literature. His poetry and writings explored the experiences of African Americans and helped give a voice to their struggles and triumphs.

What were Langston Hughes' major literary works?

Langston Hughes was known for his poetry, essays, and plays. Some of his most famous works include the poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," the play "Mulatto," and the collection of poems "Montage of a Dream Deferred."

How did Langston Hughes use his writing to address social issues?

Langston Hughes used his writing to address social issues such as racial inequality, poverty, and the struggles of African Americans in America. Through his poetry and essays, he sought to raise awareness about these issues and advocate for social change.

How did Langston Hughes contribute to the civil rights movement?

Langston Hughes was a prominent voice in the civil rights movement, using his writing to advocate for racial equality and social justice. His poetry and essays inspired and mobilized many in the fight against discrimination and segregation.

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Langston Hughes was a talented artist and writer who not only excelled in poetry but also in other forms of expression, including novels, essays, plays, and children's books.

He was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement that celebrated African American art, music, and literature in the 1920s and 1930s.

Hughes had a deep appreciation for music, particularly jazz and blues, which heavily influenced his writing style and poetic rhythms.

Hughes was a prolific traveler and visited many countries around the world, gaining inspiration from diverse cultures and experiences that enriched his writing.

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Langston Hughes: Poems, Biography, and Timeline of his early career

Contents of this path:.

• 1 2022-01-05T15:17:55-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "The Weary Blues" (full text) (1926) 12 plain 2024-02-10T07:34:48-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2023-05-07T09:35:02-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Fine Clothes to the Jew" (1927) (Full Text) 6 plain 2024-06-20T15:45:46-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-01-09T13:48:19-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Poems by Langston Hughes in "The New Negro" (1925) 1 plain 2022-01-09T13:48:19-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-01-05T15:14:17-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1921) 8 plain 2024-01-09T11:08:46-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-01-06T10:13:29-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Aunt Sue's Stories" (1921) 3 plain 2022-07-02T08:31:28-04:00 07/01/1921 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-01-05T15:08:09-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Song for a Banjo Dance" (1922) 4 plain 2024-01-09T10:53:16-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-01-06T10:16:44-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "When Sue Wears Red" (1923) 2 plain 2022-07-02T08:29:32-04:00 02/01/1923 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-07-19T14:25:59-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Dreams" (1923) 1 plain 2022-07-19T14:25:59-04:00 05/01/1923 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-07-11T11:52:37-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "The Last Feast of Belshazzar" (1923) 2 plain 2024-05-02T13:47:51-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-01-05T15:10:29-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Winter Moon" (1923) 3 plain 2024-01-09T11:00:40-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-08-04T12:23:14-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Song for a Suicide" (1924) 1 plain 2022-08-04T12:23:14-04:00 05/01/1924 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-08-16T08:40:49-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Johannesburg Mines" (1925) 1 plain 2022-08-16T08:40:49-04:00 02/01/1925 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-08-16T08:39:13-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Steel Mills" (1925) 1 plain 2022-08-16T08:39:13-04:00 02/01/1925 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-08-16T08:31:34-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "To Certain Intellectuals" (1925) 1 plain 2022-08-16T08:31:34-04:00 01/01/1925 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-07-11T12:55:18-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "To a Negro Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret" (1925) 2 plain 2022-07-11T12:56:07-04:00 12/01/1925 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-01-06T10:16:06-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "To the Black Beloved" (1925) 4 plain 2024-01-26T16:59:49-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-07-11T14:57:12-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Love Song for Lucinda" (1926) 1 plain 2022-07-11T14:57:12-04:00 05/01/1926 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-01-06T10:29:14-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Young Bride" (1925) 5 plain 2024-02-10T07:39:51-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-07-11T11:09:50-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "The Poppy Flower" (1925) 1 plain 2022-07-11T11:09:50-04:00 02/01/1925 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-01-06T10:32:10-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Summer Night" (1925) 4 plain 2022-07-11T12:42:15-04:00 12/01/1925 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-07-11T13:00:50-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "A Song to a Negro Wash-woman" (1925) 1 plain 2022-07-11T13:00:50-04:00 01/01/1925 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-08-05T16:33:06-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "To Beauty" (1926) 1 plain 2022-08-05T16:33:06-04:00 10/01/1926 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2022-08-05T15:52:56-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "The Ring" (1926) 1 plain 2022-08-05T15:52:56-04:00 04/01/1926 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-12T07:08:12-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Being Old" (1927) 1 plain 2024-03-12T07:08:12-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-10T08:39:01-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Ma Lord" (1927) 2 plain 2024-05-06T11:49:26-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-05T11:41:36-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "For an Indian Screen" (1927) 1 plain 2024-03-05T11:41:36-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-05T11:43:29-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Lincoln Monument" (1927) 2 plain 2024-03-05T11:45:02-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-05T12:33:07-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "I Thought it was Tangiers I Wanter" (1927) 1 plain 2024-03-05T12:33:07-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-05T11:44:23-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Day" (1927) 1 plain 2024-03-05T11:44:23-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-05T11:42:34-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Passing Love" (1927) 1 plain 2024-03-05T11:42:34-05:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-12T07:08:50-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Freedom Seeker" (1927) 1 plain 2024-03-12T07:08:50-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-12T09:26:11-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Montmartre Beggar Woman" (1927) 1 plain 2024-03-12T09:26:11-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
• 1 2024-03-10T08:49:52-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Langston Hughes, "Tapestry" (1927) 1 plain 2024-03-10T08:49:52-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1

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• 1 media/langston hughes 1923_thumb.jpg 2022-07-21T10:50:03-04:00 Langston Hughes Photo 1923 1 Photo of Langston Hughes taken for Robert Kerlin's "Negro Poets and their Poems" (1923) media/langston hughes 1923.jpg plain 2022-07-21T10:50:03-04:00

Langston Hughes' Impact on the Harlem Renaissance

Hughes not only made his mark in this artistic movement by breaking boundaries with his poetry, he drew on international experiences, found kindred spirits amongst his fellow artists, took a stand for the possibilities of Black art and influenced how the Harlem Renaissance would be remembered.

Hughes stood up for Black artists

George Schuyler, the editor of a Black paper in Pittsburgh, wrote the article "The Negro-Art Hokum" for an edition of The Nation in June 1926.

The article discounted the existence of "Negro art," arguing that African-American artists shared European influences with their white counterparts, and were, therefore, producing the same kind of work. Spirituals and jazz, with their clear links to Black performers, were dismissed as folk art.

Invited to make a response, Hughes penned "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." In it, he described Black artists rejecting their racial identity as "the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America." But he declared that instead of ignoring their identity, "We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual, dark-skinned selves without fear or shame."

This clarion call for the importance of pursuing art from a Black perspective was not only the philosophy behind much of Hughes' work, but it was also reflected throughout the Harlem Renaissance.

Some critics called Hughes' poems "low-rate"

Hughes broke new ground in poetry when he began to write verse that incorporated how Black people talked and the jazz and blues music they played. He led the way in harnessing the blues form in poetry with "The Weary Blues," which was written in 1923 and appeared in his 1926 collection The Weary Blues .

Hughes' next poetry collection — published in February 1927 under the controversial title Fine Clothes to the Jew — featured Black lives outside the educated upper and middle classes, including drunks and prostitutes.

A preponderance of Black critics objected to what they felt were negative characterizations of African Americans — many Black characters created by whites already consisted of caricatures and stereotypes, and these critics wanted to see positive depictions instead. Some were so incensed that they attacked Hughes in print, with one calling him "the poet low-rate of Harlem."

But Hughes believed in the worthiness of all Black people to appear in art, no matter their social status. He argued, "My poems are indelicate. But so is life." And though many of his contemporaries might not have seen the merits, the collection came to be viewed as one of Hughes' best. (The poet did end up agreeing that the title — a reference to selling clothes to Jewish pawnbrokers in hard times — was a bad choice.)

Hughes' travels helped give him different perspectives

Hughes came to Harlem in 1921, but was soon traveling the world as a sailor and taking different jobs across the globe. In fact, he spent more time outside Harlem than in it during the Harlem Renaissance.

His journeys, along with the fact that he'd lived in several different places as a child and had visited his father in Mexico, allowed Hughes to bring varied perspectives and approaches to the work he created.

In 1923, when the ship he was working on visited the west coast of Africa, Hughes, who described himself as having "copper-brown skin and straight black hair," had a member of the Kru tribe tell him he was a White man, not a Black one.

Hughes lived in Paris for part of 1924, where he eked out a living as a doorman and met Black jazz musicians. And in the fall of 1924, Hughes saw many white sailors get hired instead of him when he was desperate for a ship to take him home from Genoa, Italy. This led to his plaintive, powerful poem "I, Too," a meditation on the day that such unequal treatment would end.

Hughes and other young Black artists formed a support group

By 1925 Hughes was back in the United States, where he was greeted with acclaim. He was soon attending Lincoln University in Pennsylvania but returned to Harlem in the summer of 1926.

There, he and other young Harlem Renaissance artists like novelist Wallace Thurman, writer Zora Neale Hurston , artist Gwendolyn Bennett and painter Aaron Douglas formed a support group together.

Hughes was part of the group's decision to collaborate on Fire!! , a magazine intended for young Black artists like themselves. Instead of the limits on content they faced at more staid publications like the NAACP 's Crisis magazine, they aimed to tackle a broader, uncensored range of topics, including sex and race.

Unfortunately, the group only managed to put out a single issue of Fire!! . (And Hughes and Hurston had a falling out after a failed collaboration on a play called Mule Bone .) But by creating the magazine, Hughes and the others had still taken a stand for the kind of ideas they wanted to pursue going forward.

He continued to spread the word of the Harlem Renaissance long after it was over

In addition to what he wrote during the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes helped make the movement itself more well known. In 1931, he embarked on a tour to read his poetry across the South. His fee was ostensibly $50, but he would lower the amount, or forego it entirely, at places that couldn't afford it.

His tour and willingness to deliver free programs when necessary helped many get acquainted with the Harlem Renaissance.

And in his autobiography The Big Sea (1940), Hughes provided a firsthand account of the Harlem Renaissance in a section titled "Black Renaissance." His descriptions of the people, art and goings-on would influence how the movement was understood and remembered.

Hughes even played a part in shifting the name for the era from "Negro Renaissance" to "Harlem Renaissance," as his book was one of the first to use the latter term.

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11 Important and Interesting Facts about Langston Hughes

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Langston Hughes (1901-67) was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance in New York in the 1920s. A prolific writer, he was a novelist, playwright, social activist, and journalist, among many other things (he even wrote a musical).

In his poetry, he took his inspiration from Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Carl Sandburg (whom he referred to as ‘my guiding star’). Some of his short stories, such as the brief piece ‘ Thank You, Ma’am ’, are widely studied in schools and colleges in the US.

Below, we have gathered together some of the most interesting key facts concerning Langston Hughes’ life and work.

1. In 2018, it was revealed that Langston Hughes was a year older than previously thought.

Although biographers agreed that Hughes was born on 1 February, 1902, in 2018 that all changed, and new evidence came to light showing that Hughes had been born a whole year earlier .

The American poet Eric McHenry told the New York Times that he was trawling through digitised local newspaper archives when he spotted a note on the society page of the African American weekly newspaper, the Topeka Plaindealer , which mentioned a ‘Little Langston Hughes’ who had been ill but was ‘improving’. That article was published on 20 December 1901, around six weeks before Hughes was supposed to have been born!

Further digging in the archives confirmed that Hughes was indeed born on 1 February 1901 – not 1902.

2. Hughes’ mother was also a poet.

Langston’s mother, Carrie Langston Hughes, also wrote poetry and was an amateur actress. Hughes later recalled how his mother took him to see all of the plays that were put on in Topeka, Kansas, where he spent some time growing up. He and his mother shared a love of plays – and books. Hughes’ parents separated when he was small, and his father emigrated to Mexico.

3. He began publishing poetry at a young age.

The precocious Hughes, influenced by – among others – the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and the nineteenth-century free-verse pioneer Walt Whitman, began publishing poems and short stories while still in high school. These early works appeared in Central High Monthly Magazine and the Belfry Owl .

4. He had an itinerant childhood, living in a number of US states.

Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri and raised in a number of states: Missouri, but also Kansas, Illinois, and Ohio. He even lived in Mexico with his father in 1919, and again in 1920-21, before he enrolled at university to study engineering.

5. He attended Columbia University for a year in 1921-22, but left because of racial prejudice.

Hughes tried hard to fit in at Columbia, which was still overwhelmingly white and middle-class at the time. He published poetry in the Columbia Daily Spectator under a pen name. But he ended up leaving the university in 1922 because of racial prejudice from students and teachers. He was even denied a room on campus because he was black.

6. He travelled extensively.

After he left Columbia without a degree, Hughes travelled around South America and Europe. In the early 1920s, following his departure from Columbia, he worked at a range of odd jobs, including kitchen worker, delivery boy, vegetable farmer, mess boy on a ship on the Hudson River, and even a crew member on a merchant steamer bound for Africa.

He returned to the US and settled in Washington, D. C. in 1925, but later moved to New York.

7. However, he spent relatively little time living in New York.

Despite being a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes spent just a couple of years living in New York, between 1928 and 1930 (in addition to his year at Columbia University).

He wrote well about Harlem in his fiction and poetry, and one of his most famous poems is simply titled ‘ Harlem ’. In his 1940 autobiographical work The Big Sea , he recorded his impressions of the Harlem Renaissance.

8. He wrote one of his best-known poems in Italy, while waiting for a ship home.

He wrote his short lyric poem ‘ I, Too ’ following his experiences trying to gain passage aboard a ship from Italy back to the United States in 1924; he was repeatedly passed over for a place on board numerous ships while white sailors were welcomed aboard. Racial inequality, then, is obviously a key theme in Hughes’ poem.

In this poem, with its an allusive nod to Walt Whitman’s poem ‘I Hear America Singing’, Hughes – describing himself as the ‘darker brother’ – highlights the plight of African Americans at the time, having to eat separately from everyone else in the kitchen when guests arrive, but determined to strive and succeed in the ‘Land of the Free’.

9. Another of his best-known poems was composed on a train ride when he was still a teenager.

Hughes wrote ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’, one of his finest and deepest poems, while crossing the Mississippi river by train on his way to Mexico to stay with his father. This poem was published in the influential journal the Crisis , and Langston Hughes’ literary career was launched. He was just nineteen when he wrote the poem.

This is another poem that bears the influence of Whitman, though Hughes does something very different with the expansive free verse style he learned from that nineteenth-century American verse pioneer.

10. He was called to testify before Senator Joseph McCarthy during the McCarthy ‘witch hunts’ of the 1950s.

Langston Hughes had written a number of journalistic pieces in support of the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. He also expressed sympathy for American Communists, and wrote a poem, ‘Good Morning Revolution’ (1932), in support of Communist revolution in the US.

So in 1953, Hughes found himself testifying before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s committee investigating ‘Un-American’ activities. This can hardly have come as a shock to Hughes, especially after one of his most divisive political poems, ‘Goodbye Christ’, had been published (without his permission) in the Saturday Evening Post .

This poem dismisses Jesus Christ as an obsolete figure whose message had been subverted and distorted by money-grubbing churchmen. Instead, people should follow a ‘real’ person, such as Lenin, Stalin, or even the poet himself.

11. As well as his numerous poems, short stories, and longer prose works, Hughes also wrote a musical.

Simply Heavenly was a musical comedy based on one of Hughes’ novels, Simple Takes A Wife . Hughes wrote the book (the dialogue) and the lyrics to the songs, with David Martin providing the music. The musical premiered in 1957.

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8 Fascinating Facts About Langston Hughes

By danielle broadway | feb 23, 2023, 2:03 pm est.

Langston Hughes wasn’t just a famous Black poet, novelist, playwright, and reporter who helped define New York City’s Harlem Renaissance—he was also an activist that reflected the multifaceted lives of the Black community. Often called “ The People’s Poet ,” he had an uncanny talent for depicting Black joy, sorrow, struggles, and victories in his writing.

Born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902 (or 1901, as recent evidence suggests ), Hughes was raised in Lawrence, Kansas, by his grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston . An educator and abolitionist, she taught him the importance of loving himself despite society’s racism; as a result, Hughes never stopped fighting for systemic change and figuring out how he could use his gifts to create a more equitable world. Here are eight things you should know about Langston Hughes.

1. Langston Hughes was a teenager when he wrote one of his most popular poems.

Langston Hughes was just 17 when he wrote “ The Negro Speaks of Rivers ,” one of his most recognizable poems . It was published the following year in the June 1921 issue of The Crisis , a magazine founded by W.E.B. Du Bois as the official publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In May 1941, Hughes wrote Du Bois a heartfelt thank-you letter in honor of the 20th anniversary of his first poem being published.

2. He originally went to school for engineering.

Before Hughes’s poetry career took off, he was an engineering student at Columbia University in New York City. He attended the School of Mines, Engineering, and Chemistry in 1921 after his father convinced him to choose a stable career. While Hughes performed well in school and maintained a B+ average, he dropped out after only spending a year in the program. He later switched universities and majors to study English at Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania.

3. Hughes came from a family of activists.

Hughes came from an impressive lineage of abolitionists and activists. His maternal grandfather, Charles Henry Langston, advocated for equal rights, education, and suffrage in Ohio and Kansas for 30 years [ PDF ]. Hughes’s great-uncle , John Mercer Langston, was also an abolitionist, as well as an attorney, politician, and diplomat who was one of the first Black men in the United States elected to public office when he was voted as township clerk of Brownhelm, Ohio, in 1855. Later, he became the first Black man elected to Congress from Virginia, where he served during the 51st Congress from 1889 to 1891.

4. He was a pioneer of jazz poetry.

In 1958, Hughes recited his poem “ The Weary Blues ” on Canada’s The 7 O'Clock Show with jazz accompaniment from the Doug Parker Band. “The Weary Blues” was originally published in Opportunity , a magazine founded by the National Urban League , and ended up winning the prize for best poem of the year in 1925 when Hughes was about 24 years old.

It was one of the many poems he wrote that used a rhythm similar to that of jazz music. Hughes’s jazz poetry—a style he pioneered —reflected the Black experience in many ways, and he'd later say , “[Jazz] to me is 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, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.”

5. Hughes went to the Soviet Union to make a movie about being Black in America.

Hughes and 21 other Black creatives traveled to the Soviet Union in 1932 to take part in a film about Black life in the American South called Black and White . Activist Louise Thompson—a longtime friend of Hughes—put the cast together and envisioned the project as being a more honest portrayal of Black hardship than what Hollywood was capable of at the time.

The whole project soon fell apart, with some of the Black talent involved claiming that the Soviets axed the film in order to “curry favor with Washington,” according to The New York Times . Still, Hughes blamed the whole thing on simple creative differences, later writing of the issue: “O, Movies. Temperaments. Artists. Ambitions. Scenarios. Directors, producers, advisers, actors, censors, changes, revisions, conferences. It’s a complicated art—the cinema. I’m glad I write poems.”

6. He was also a reporter.

While most people know Hughes for his work as a poet, he was also a reporter for 20 years, mostly writing for the Chicago Defender , a long-running Black news outlet that started up in 1905. In 1937, he traveled to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War for the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper. During this time, he covered the Black Americans who volunteered to fight in Spain on the side of the leftist Republican government as part of the International Brigades. (Of those volunteer troops, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade included Black commanders leading integrated troops .) In addition to the articles, Hughes wrote two poems called “Postcard from Spain” and “Letter from Spain” during his time covering the war.

7. He had a friendship—and then a falling out—with Zora Neale Hurston.

In 1925, Hughes met and befriended another central literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance , Zora Neale Hurston. The celebrated writer and folklorist was attending Columbia University as a graduate student at the time, and the pair later embarked on a tour of the Deep South together in 1927.

While the two had plenty of things in common—including a shared patron , Charlotte Osgood Mason, who was a white socialite living in Manhattan—they eventually had a falling out in 1931, after working together on Mule Bone, a play based off Hurston’s short story , “The Bone of Contention.” Reportedly, Hughes tried to produce a version of it on stage in Pennsylvania without Hurston. Ultimately, the rift was never fully mended, and they remained estranged for years.

8. Hughes’s poems are still appearing in the media today.

Langston Hughes’s work continues to inspire artists in all kinds of media today. American cartoonist Stephen Bentley, creator of the Herb & Jamal comic , included Hughes’s poem “ Acceptance ” in the comic's March 4, 2010 strip and “ Still here ” in the March 27, 2010 strip. Award-winning illustrator Afua Richardson, who’s worked for Marvel, DC, and Image, also created comic book panels based on the poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” for NPR in 2014 . She then used the illustrated panels to create a video that includes her original artwork with an audio reading of the poem.

The recent Fresh Prince of Bel-Air reboot on Peacock also pays homage to Hughes, using his 100-year-old poem, “ Mother to Son ” in a trailer for the dramatized version of the sitcom. The 1922 poem is read by April Parker Jones ( Supergirl ), who plays Will’s (Jabari Banks) mom. The poem signifies the darker tone of the 2022 series and how it delves into the devastation of class divide within the Black community and Black life in an anti-Black America.

A version of this article was originally published in 2022 and has been updated for 2023.

World History Edu

• Langston Hughes / Renowned Writers

10 Facts about Langston Hughes

by World History Edu · April 11, 2021

Langston Hughes – quick facts

Born in 1901 in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes was one of the first African-American poets and writers to make a living doing what he was most passionate about: writing.

He rose to very lofty heights and quickly became critically acclaimed as the most influential writer during the Harlem Renaissance . Going by the epithets, “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race” or “Poet Laureate of Harlem”, the writer gave the world famous poems like ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’, ‘The Weary Blues’, ‘Let America Be America Again’, and ‘A Dream Deferred’.

Many of Hughes’ works were used to highlight the struggles that the ordinary working-class African-American folks of his era went through on a daily basis. He had such an amazing ability to draw on the experiences and challenges he had during his childhood years. What other things was Langston Hughes known for?

Below World History Edu presents to you 10 major facts that you probably didn’t know about Langston Hughes.

Langston Hughes was prolific, writing over a dozen volumes of poetry

In his about four-decade writing career, it has been estimated that Langston Hughes penned over a dozen volumes of poetry, two novels, two autobiographies, and nine children’s books. Those weren’t all his works though. Hughes was also credited with writing about two dozen plays and many radio and television scripts.

Did you know : Langston Hughes translated the works of many acclaimed writers, including Federico García Lorca and Jacques Roumain?

His poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was written on his train ride to Mexico

While growing up, Langston Hughes’ decision to earn his living from writing poems and scripts was not the most welcoming of news to his family, especially his father. However, that all changed when his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was published in the June 1921 copy of Crisis magazine, a magazine ran by W.E.B. Dubois . The poem was perhaps what launched Hughes’ writing career, convincing his father that Hughes truly had the talent to excel in his chosen field.

According to his biographers, Hughes penned down “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” while aboard a train ride to visit his father who was by then in Mexico. According to Hughes, the moment of inspiration, or magic, came when the train was approaching St. Louis, as the sun set on the banks of the famous Mississippi River.

Did you know : Initially Langston Hughes’ father wanted him to become an engineer and study at a university abroad?

Langston Hughes walked the title of his second autobiography I Wonder as I Wander

Some historians have stated that one of the reasons why Langston Hughes was such a prolific writer was because of his numerous journeys abroad. The writer and playwright visited several countries in Central Asia, the Caribbean, Africa, the Far East and Europe.

Hughes’ first trip to Africa came in his 20s when took a job as a ship deckhand. This afforded him the opportunity to travel to many African countries. He also had memorable experiences visiting European countries like Italy, France and the Netherlands.

In the early 1930s, Hughes took a trip through the Caribbean, visiting places in countries such as Cuba and Haiti. His longest time abroad was perhaps when he served as a journalist for the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper and other newspapers, covering the Spanish Civil War .

His maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston, played a significant role in his upbringing

In his autobiographies, Hughes showered heaps of praises on his grandmother Mary Langston for stepping into the shoes of his parents who pretty much were absent from his life growing up. Who was Mary Langston? Not only was Mary the first African-American woman to enroll at Oberlin College in Ohio, she was also the wife of an associate of John Brown, the infamous abolitionist leader of the 19 th century.

Of mixed race descent, Mary imbued in Langston Hughes a sense of black pride and respect for the downtrodden black people. She was the reason why he grew up to be full of praise for the hard work, everyday struggles and joy of the working-class black people.

Growing up, Hughes was fascinated by the stories that his Mary told him, most of them being about his family lineage, their struggles and heroism right from the years of slavery down to the Reconstruction era. Those stories undoubtedly shaped the person that Hughes went on to become. It came as no surprise that he paid immense homage to his grandmother, who died in his early teens, in his poem titled “Aunt Sue’s Stories”.

Facts about Langston Hughes | Langston Hughes – 1940 autobiography The Big Sea

His first major poem was published when he was 19

After stacking up so much experience as the poet of his class and the contributor of the literary magazine of his school, Langston Hughes entered his late teens with a very refined writing prowess. And although a number of his poems got rejected by poetry magazines, his big breakthrough came when he was about 19. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was published in the June 1921 copy of Crisis magazine.

Five years later, Hughes saw his first book published. The book was his first volume of poetry, titled The Weary Blues. It contained themes of black struggles, black pride and culture.

Langston Hughes appeared before a Senate Committee

Prior to appearing before a U.S. Senate Committee in 1953, Langston Hughes is believed to have taken his time and written a five-page statement explaining his reasons for supporting left political doctrines. Hughes had not hidden his admiration for some socialist policies that many politicians on Capitol Hill found a bit disturbing. Hence he was invited to testify before the Senate Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations.

Senators grilled him on some of his slightly controversial poems such as “One More ‘S’ in the U.S.A.”. Hughes was also asked several times whether he was a member of the Communist Party, to which he emphatically responded with a no.

The decision to invite Hughes to testify was triggered by Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957) who throughout the early 1950s levelled accusations upon accusations that communist elements had infiltrated the U.S. State Department. As chairman of the Senate’s subcommittee on Investigations, Senator McCarthy presided over a period known as the Red Scare, which saw LGBT federal employees unduly targeted, with some of them even losing their jobs.

The idea to write his first memoir was given to him when he was 23

At just the age of 23, Langston Hughes was encouraged by his mentor called Carl Van Vechten to write his first memoir. Hughes was taken aback by the suggestion of Vechten, considering the fact that he was still in the early years of his career. It would take about 15 years before he put out his first memoir, The Big Sea.

The reason why he was encouraged to write his memoir at that early age stemmed from the amazing autobiographical essay he penned down. The essay, which was attached to his first volume of poetry, The Weary Blues , completely took Carl Van Vechten by surprise. Therefore, Vechten encouraged him to turn the essay into full-fledged memoir. However, Hughes declined, stating that he was still too young.

He dropped out of Columbia University in order to travel the world

After caving into his father’s request for him to study engineering in exchange for financial assistance,

While studying at Columbia University, Hughes got very disenchanted with the course and decided to drop out of school. He was at Columbia for about a year and had maintained a B+ grade average. However, he quickly realized that he was spending a lot of time hanging out in Harlem neighborhood, soaking in the culture and artistic atmosphere that was flourishing at the time. The environment there was starkly different from the racial prejudice he felt on the campus of the university.

After he dropped out in 1922, he went on to take a number of jobs in New York. In 1923, he sailed to West Africa and Spain on board the S.S. Malone as crewman for a shipping company. He also spent some time in Paris, where he became romantically involved with Anne Marie Coussey – a British-educated African from the Gold Coast (now Ghana).

He was a columnist for the Chicago Defender

Another very productive phase in Langston Hughes’ career was when he worked as a columnist for the Chicago Defender. He came up with a character called Jesse B. Semple, also known as “Simple” – an ordinary African American who tries to navigate the daily challenges that faced working-class Black families.

As a matter of fact, some of his most famous works came during this period. His column objectively discussed racial issues and a host of other socio-economic problems in general. Hughes wrote a number of spin offs, including books and plays, of the character known as “Simple”. His goal was to use the character to amplify the voice of Black people, enabling them to take immense pride in their race, identity and culture.

Some historians claim that Langston Hughes was gay

Due to some obvious references to male love interests in his poems and short stories, some histories opine that Langston Hughes was gay. Apart from the romantic relationship he had while in France, there was no known close female partner in his life. Also, Langston Hughes never married. Moreover, many of his friends were known to be or either perceived as gay – for example Zell Ingram and Ferdinand Smith.

Read More: 10 Interesting Facts about the Harlem Renaissance

Other facts

Facts about Langston Hughes

• After battling prostate cancer for quite some time, the renowned African-American writer and poet died on May 22, 1967. The 66-year-old was cremated and his ashes interred at the entrance of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York.
• His Paternal great-grandparents were slave owners in Kentucky. For example, one of them was called Sam Clay – a Scottish-American whiskey distiller who was related to the famous Senator Henry Clay.
• His maternal great-grandmothers were enslaved Africans.
• At Lincoln University, Langston Hughes was a classmate of Thurgood Marshall – the first African-American Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
• Initially, a great number of his works were published in the newspaper of the Communist Party of the United State (CPUSA). He was also a member of communist organizations such as John Reed clubs and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. At one point in time, he even supported Joseph Stalin’s purges.
• Initially, he was against the U.S. taking part in WWII; he also did not want Blacks to enlist in the army because of the discrimination many of them faced due to Jim Crow laws and racial segregation in the South. Hughes, however, later made a U-turn and supported the U.S. involvement in WWII.

Tags: Harlem Renaissance Harlem Renaissance artists New York City Poetry

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Poet Biographies

The Life and Times of Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was a prolific poet, novelist, and playwright whose work was marked by a passionate commitment to social justice and the celebration of Black culture, merging traditional African American rhythms with modernist experimentation.

Langston Hughes had a five-decade career in which he wrote short stories , poems, plays, and books for children, as well as newspaper columns, and novels . He is considered today as one of the, if not the, most important writers of the Harlem Renaissance , one of the most influential American poets and predecessors for modern black poets. His work implemented a fusion of traditional African-American rhythms with modernist experimentation. A pioneer in his field, Hughes’ was responsible for the emergence of jazz poetry, a form of writing that mimics jazz music. Thematically, Hughes would consistently touch on the notion of identity, discrimination, and social justice.

About Langston Hughes

• 1 Life Facts
• 2 Interesting Facts
• 3 Famous Poems
• 4 Early Life
• 5 Literary Career
• 6 Writing Career and Relationships
• 8 Influence from other Poets
• 9 The Harlem Renaissance
• 10 Jazz Poetry
• 11 Langston Hughes FAQs
• Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in February of 1901.
• His most famous poem is often cited as ‘ Negro Speaks of Rivers ‘.
• Langston Hughes became a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.
• Hughes wrote poems , plays, stories, children’s books, and novels.
• Hughes died at 65 after complications from prostate surgery.

Interesting Facts

• Hughes initially went to engineering school.
• Hughes traveled to the Soviet Union and had a fascination with Communism.
• He also went to West Africa and throughout Europe.
• Hughes published his autobiography at 28 years old.
• His home is now a nationally registered landmark.

Famous Poems

• ‘Negro Speaks of Rivers ’ is often cited as Langston Hughes’ most famous poem and he only wrote it when he was seventeen years old. It is told from the perceptive of an old black man who has traveled the world and seen an incredible amount of history play out on riverbanks. He has seen everything from the building of the pyramids to Abraham Lincoln.
• ‘ Montage of a Dream Deferred ’ ,  also commonly known as ‘Harlem’ is a book-length poem. The text speaks about the lives of Harlem residents who are not experiencing the “American Dream”, but instead are having their dreams deferred. The speaker questions the state of the world, where his dreams, and those of his neighbors, went. 
• ‘ I, Too, Sing America ’  is one of the shortest poems on this list. In it, the speaker explores why he’s treated differently, as a black man, then others are. He looks to the future and presents the reader with a more hopeful vision of his life. At some point, he’s going to be treated as he deserves.
• ‘ Mother to Son ‘  was first published in December of 1922 in the magazine, Crisis.  This incredibly moving poem uses the metaphor of a staircase, and the narrative voice of a mother, to describe for a young man the troubles ahead.
• ‘ Let America Be America Again ’   also focuses on the American dream. In the poem, Hughes speaker wonders if the idealized dream of America that he used to believe in even exists at all. It might be possible for it to return at some point, but not now. There is too much wrong with America for the “dream” to be a reality.

Explore more Langston Hughes poems .

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in February of 1901. His ancestry was a complicated one due to the fact that his paternal great-grandmothers were both enslaved and his great-grandfathers were slave owners. Hughes’s parents, James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Langston divorced soon after his birth. James left the family and traveled throughout South America. Hughes’ mother spent a great deal of time traveling, seeking out some form of employment. This meant that Hughes was raised primarily by his maternal grandmother.

Most of Hughes’ childhood was spent in Lawrence, Kansas. It was here his grandmother instilled in him a pride for his race and deep care for those struggling around him. When his grandmother died he lived with family friends and then later with his mother in Lincoln, Illinois.

A short time later he was attending Central High School in Cleveland, Ohio. It is known that he began writing when he was very young. He was named the class poet in grammar school and in High School, he wrote for the newspaper. His first short stories, play, and poetry was formed during this time as well.

Hughes graduated from high school and traveled to Mexico where he lived with his father for a short time. It was his goal to acquire some kind of financial assistance, or at least support, for his further education at Columbia University. He intended to become a writer. Hughes’s father did not support his plan but after negotiation, he did receive some assistance.

Literary Career

While at Columbia he was an average student and became part of the Harlem Renaissance. This period was known for its explosion of artistic and intellectuality, centered around the African American community in Harlem, New York. He did not remain at Columbia long though, leaving in 1922 due to racial prejudice among the students and teachers.

In 1923 he spent six months on a ship traveling to West Africa and Europe, including Paris and England. Hughes returned to America in 1924 and moved in with his mother in Washington, D.C. He found employment as a personal assistant at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The position proved to be too much of a time constraint on his writing and he quit working as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel.

Writing Career and Relationships

It was around this period of time that Hughes met the poet Vachel Lindsey who publicized his work. Up until this point, Hughes’ writing had only appeared in magazines. His first book, and collection,  The Weary Blues,  appeared soon after in 1926. This work won first prize in a literary magazine competition and supplied him with the scholarship he needed to continue his studies. It was followed by  Fine Clothes to the Jew  in 1927.

In 1924, Hughes met Carl van Vechten at a party he attended in Harlem. They kicked off a long-lasting intellectual relationship, corresponding via letters for over forty years. Van Vechten became one of his primary influences, helping Hughes on his path to literary greatness.

In 1926, Hughes produced one of his greatest pieces of work ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’. This essay was intended as a sincere depiction of the ups and downs of the lives of working-class black people in America during the 1920s. In the essay, Hughes expresses his indifference towards how white people viewed him “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs.”

Hughes enrolled in Lincoln University in Chester Country, Pennsylvania. It was known as a historically black university and he attended at the same time as the future Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall.

Hughes completed his studies and graduated with a B.A. in 1929. At this point, he returned to New York and lived primarily in Harlem for the rest of his life. His first novel was published this same year titled,  Not Without Laughter.  The book was his first commercial success and validated his own beliefs in himself.

Throughout the 30s he traveled the United States lecturing. His first collection of short stories appeared in 1934. Two years later what is now his most popular poem,  ‘ Let American Be America Again ’  was published in  Esquire.  It was focused on the disadvantages of the lower class and the hope for the American Dream.

In 1940, he published an autobiography of the first part of his life It was titled,  The Big Sea.  He was also working for the  Chicago Defender  writing about a comical character he named Jesse B. The decade also saw Hughes contribute lyrics to a Broadway musical and begin teaching creative writing at Atlanta University. At the beginning of 1951, he published ‘ Harlem (What happens to a dream deferred?’ ).”

Langston Hughes died in May of 1967 in New York City from complications due to prostate cancer. His ashes were interred at the entrance of the Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. Additionally, his home was registered as a historic landmark.

Influence from other Poets

Langston Hughes was notably influenced by writers such as  Paul Laurence Dunbar ,  Carl Sandburg , and  Walt Whitman . As part of the Harlem Renaissance, he has served as a major influence on generations of poets who have come after him and looked to the movement for inspiration.

Jessie Fauset also played a vital role in nurturing the talent of Hughes, as she became a mentor for many up-and-coming black writers during the Harlem Renaissance. Some of the most notable of these were  Countee Cullen ,  Claude McKay ,  Jean Toomer,  and  Anne Spencer .

Influence and relations with other poets weren’t always on the positive end. Langston Hughes did find some displeasure aimed towards him from up-and-coming writers as time moved on. As racial integration began to happen, there was a graduation of a new wave of black poets. Younger poets criticized Hughes for his outdated view of the societal landscape. Hughes himself lashed back at the new generation, and in particular James Baldwin, considering his work to be angry, prideless, and somewhat tasteless.

The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was a literary movement surrounding mainly African American poets, and novelists in the late 1920s, that continued into the 1930s. Langston Hughes emerged as a spearhead for this movement with his work that addressed racial consciousness, but unlike the work of previous, and later poets, it was focused on removing hate and resentment. Scholars believe that his work  The Nation  became a manifesto for the movement, and other writers followed in his footsteps.

Jazz Poetry

Hughes was not only a leader and inspiration for fellow black poets, but he also was a pioneer of his craft, pushing new boundaries with his poetic style . He is known for being the founder of ‘jazz poetry’. Jazz poetry runs throughout Langston Hughes’ work and mimics the rhythmic elements of jazz music, with the intent to be read in such a way. He would implement techniques such as jive language, and syncopated rhythms, and would even alternate his phrasing to mirror the creative and flexible nature of jazz music itself.

Langston Hughes FAQs

‘ The Negro Speaks of Rivers ‘ is arguably Langston Hughes’ most well-known poem from his collection of quality work. Even though Hughes was only in his teenage years when the poem was written, its excellent description of black cultural history is way beyond his years.

A powerful quote by Langston Hughes that has lasted the test of time is his quote about dreams. He says “ Hold fast to your dreams, for without them life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.” One interpretation of the quote is that true happiness in life is not attainable without having goals, a purpose, or dreams, to aim for.

The Ways of the White Folk is one of Langston Hughes’ most celebrated collections of short stories . Published in 1934, it is a group of 14 short stories about the lives of black people colliding.

Langston Hughes was most popular, and in his literary prime, during the 1920s. He was a key part of the Harlem Renaissance , a movement that flowered many black intellectuals, poets, and novelists.

Langston Hughes was famous for his vital role in bringing the spotlight onto black poetry, novels , and other intellectual pursuits. During the 1920s he wrote a number of poems, short stories , novels , and essays that highlighted the African American experience, showcasing both the hardships and the joys of being part of black culture.

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Green, William. "The Life and Times of Langston Hughes". Poem Analysis , https://poemanalysis.com/langston-hughes/biography/ . Accessed 30 June 2024.

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Langston Hughes Facts

Langston Hughes was an American writer who became well-known for being an early innovator of jazz poetry and leader of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. He was born Jams Mercer Langston Hughes on February 1, 1901 in Joplin, Missouri, to Caroline and James Nathaniel Hughes. Langston grew up in various small towns in the Midwest. His father soon left and divorced his mother, and his mother began to travel, leaving Langston to be raised by his maternal grandmother until her death. He then went to live with family friends before living with his mother again. Langston began writing when he was young and was elected class poet while in grammar school. He wrote for the school newspaper and yearbook ad began to write poetry and short stories. He went on to attend Columbia University but dropped out because of racial prejudice. Langston's father wanted him to pursue engineering which he did at Columbia University before dropping out. After leaving Columbia Langston Hughes traveled through Europe and Africa. Upon his return to the United States, Langston earned his BA in English from Lincoln University. One of his classmates was future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Langston Hughes wrote a play that opened on Broadway in 1935, titled Mulatto. During the McCarthyism era Langston Hughes was detained for questioning because of his fascination with Communism which he developed during his trips to the Soviet Union. Langston Hughes most famous poem was 'Negro Speaks of Rivers' which he wrote in high school. His epitaph came from this poem - 'my soul has grown deep as the rivers'. Langston Hughes autobiography titles The Big Sea was published when he was 28 years old. Langston Hughes lived at East 127 Street in Harlem, which has since become a national registered landmark. Langston Hughes work as a writer included novels, columns, plays, poetry, and jazz poetry. Both of Langston Hughes great grandfathers lived in Kentucky and were white slave owners. Both of his paternal great grandmothers were enslaved African Americans. Langston Hughes first jazz poem was When Sue Wears Red, which he wrote while still in high school. Langston Hughes first poetry collection was published in 1926, titled The Weary Blues. Langston Hughes first novel was published in 1930 titled Without Laughter. Langston Hughes first short story collection was published in 1934, titled The Ways of White Folks. It is still considered to be one of his best works. Langston Hughes became involved in the Harlem Renaissance from the time he attended Columbia University. Langston worked for the Chicago Defender for 20 years as a columnist. Langston worked as a newspaper correspondent in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Langston Hughes never married and never had any children. He remained a resident of Harlem in New York City for most of his life. Langston Hughes was awarded several honorary degrees from various universities. Following Langston's death the City College of New York created the Langston Hughes Medal for African American writers. Langston Hughes died at the age of 65 after prostate cancer surgery complications. More Topics Handwriting Difference Between 2020 Calendar Online Calculators Multiplication Educational Videos Coloring Pages Privacy policy Terms of Use © 2005-2020 Softschools.com 184 IMAGES Langston Hughes 10 Facts about Langston Hughes Biography of Langston Hughes, American Poet Langston Hughes Biography Langston Hughes Biography About Langston Hughes (Biography & Facts) VIDEO Breath of a Rose by William Grant Still Harlem by Langston Hughes Langston Hughes BHPOC quotes from langston hughes "Stars" By Langston Hughes Discover the Historic Past of Langston Hughes in this Neighborhood Transformation COMMENTS Langston Hughes Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes (born February 1, 1902?, Joplin, Missouri, U.S.—died May 22, 1967, New York, New York) was an American writer who was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance and made the African American experience the subject of his writings, which ranged from poetry and plays to novels and newspaper columns. Langston Hughes: Biography, Poet, Harlem Renaissance Writer Langston Hughes was a Black poet and writer whose work made him a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Read about his poems, books, quotes, and more facts. Langston Hughes James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901 - May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri.One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.He famously wrote about the period that "the Negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as ... 7 Facts About Literary Icon Langston Hughes Jesse B. Semple was inspired by a bar patron. One night at Patsy's Bar in Harlem in 1942, Hughes was amused by a conversation with another patron, who was complaining about his job making cranks ... Langston Hughes Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. He sought to honestly portray the joys and hardships of working-class black lives, avoiding both sentimental ... Langston Hughes Biography A career begins Hughes spent the year after high school in Mexico with his father, who tried to discourage him from writing. But Hughes's poetry and prose (writings) were beginning to appear in the Brownie's Book, a publication for children edited by W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), and he was starting work on more ambitious material for adult readers. Langston Hughes Langston Hughes was a defining figure of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance as an influential poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, political commentator and social activist. Known as a poet of the ... About Langston Hughes Langston Hughes. James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes's birth year was revised from 1902 to 1901 after new research from 2018 uncovered that he had been born a year earlier. His parents, James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Langston Hughes, divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved ... Langston Hughes Langston Hughes (1901-1967) was a poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, columnist, and a significant figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes was the descendant of enslaved African American women and white slave owners in Kentucky. He attended high school in Cleveland, Ohio, where he wrote his first poetry ... Langston Hughes Facts Langston Hughes, American writer who was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance and who vividly depicted the African American experience through his writings, which ranged from poetry and plays to novels and newspaper columns. Learn more about Hughes's life and work. Biography of Langston Hughes, American Poet Known For: Poet, novelist, journalist, activist. Born: February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. Parents: James and Caroline Hughes (née Langston) Died: May 22, 1967 in New York, New York. Education: Lincoln University of Pennsylvania. Selected Works: The Weary Blues, The Ways of White Folks, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Montage of a Dream Deferred. 15 Langston Hughes Facts: His Life & Accomplishments Learning Langston Hughes facts can open the door to learning more about poetry, travel, and history. Dig deeper into his life and influence here. Langston Hughes Biography Childhood & Early Life. James Hughes was born on 1 February 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, to Native Americans with Afro-American ancestry. His mother, Carrie Langston was a school teacher and his father was James Nathaniel Hughes. Shortly after his birth, his father abandoned their family and later filed for divorce. Langston Hughes: Poems, Biography, and Timeline of his early career 21320plain2024-03-15T14:27:40-04:00. Langston Hughes (1902-1967) is perhaps the best-known African American poet of the twentieth-century. Born in Joplin, Missouri, as a young man Hughes also spent time in Mexico, Chicago, and Kansas before returning to Cleveland for high school. Hughes graduated high school in 1920, and spent time in Mexico ... Langston Hughes' Impact on the Harlem Renaissance The writer and poet Langston Hughes made his mark in this artistic movement by breaking boundaries with his poetry and the renaissance's lasting legacy. During the Harlem Renaissance, which took ... 11 Important and Interesting Facts about Langston Hughes Below, we have gathered together some of the most interesting key facts concerning Langston Hughes' life and work. 1. In 2018, it was revealed that Langston Hughes was a year older than previously thought. Although biographers agreed that Hughes was born on 1 February, 1902, in 2018 that all changed, and new evidence came to light showing ... Langston Hughes Biography Langston Hughes Biography. L angston Hughes was an integral part of the Harlem Renaissance, a period during the 1920s and 1930s that was characterized by an artistic flowering of African American ... 8 Fascinating Facts About Langston Hughes Here are eight things you should know about Langston Hughes. 1. Langston Hughes was a teenager when he wrote one of his most popular poems. Langston Hughes was just 17 when he wrote " The Negro ... 10 Facts about Langston Hughes Other facts. Facts about Langston Hughes. After battling prostate cancer for quite some time, the renowned African-American writer and poet died on May 22, 1967. The 66-year-old was cremated and his ashes interred at the entrance of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York. Langston Hughes: 10 Facts Harlem Renaissance leader, poet, activist, novelist and playwright Langston Hughes died May 22, 1967. We're remembering Hughes with a look at 10 key facts about his life and career. 1.… About Langston Hughes (Biography & Facts) Life Facts. Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in February of 1901. His most famous poem is often cited as ' Negro Speaks of Rivers '. Langston Hughes became a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes wrote poems, plays, stories, children's books, and novels. Hughes died at 65 after complications from prostate surgery. Langston Hughes Facts Langston Hughes Facts. Langston Hughes was an American writer who became well-known for being an early innovator of jazz poetry and leader of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. He was born Jams Mercer Langston Hughes on February 1, 1901 in Joplin, Missouri, to Caroline and James Nathaniel Hughes. Langston grew up in various small towns in ... 9 things you should know about Langston Hughes He was a world traveler. "He was more than just an African American. He was much more than an American. He was a man of the world," Tidwell said. "A lot of people are not aware of or tend not to pay much attention to the fact that Langston Hughes was a world traveler.". His autobiographies "The Big Sea" (1940) and "I Wonder as I ... essay homework paper phd project resume review study thesis